Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English by Robert Scholes (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews255 myopic to anyone looking at the writings of William Byrd, Thomas Jefferson, William Faulkner, and others. Still, these are not major problems. Student and teacher alike will find this a most usable and reliable introduction to its subject. A well written and well edited anthology, The History of Southern Literature will for years be an invaluable companion for readers of Southern literature and a model for similar future endeavors. Southern Utah State College JIM ATON ROBERT SCHOLES. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 176 p. Textual Power is Robert Scholes' third book on current literary theory. Its focus on pedagogical applications of this theory is what distinguishes it from the first two, Structuralism in Literature and Semiotics and Interpretation. Notably, two other books published in 1985 have a similar focus, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)Pedagogyfrom Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys by Gregory L. Ulmer and Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature, a collection of essays edited by G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson. Textual Power may, then, be part of a burgeoning trend. These pedagogical applications of contemporary theory invite comparison with New Criticism's pedagogy, which assumed its most visible and lasting form in Brooks and Warren's trilogy of textbooks, Understanding Poetry, Understanding Fiction, and Understanding Drama. These titles remind us of one legacy of the New Criticism, namely, the introductory courses to poetry, fiction, and drama that English departments typically offer alongside the traditional introductory historical surveys of American and British literature. These textbooks also remind us that New Criticism's formalist understanding of literature took the form of interpretations that were both complex and objective. Atkins and Johnson's main title, "writing and reading differently," points to one way that the burgeoning new pedagogy distinguishes itself from New Criticism's. For this new pedagogy appears to be taking its lead from current theory's strong interest in the interrelations between reading and writing. This interest surfaces in Textual Power in two ways. First, in one of the best chapters in the book — "Is There a Fish in This Text?" — Scholes proposes to reorient the teaching of composition by basing writing on reading rather than observation or immediate experience. Second, most of the book is framed by an analysis of the English department's hierarchical subordination of composition to literature. While Scholes doesn't propose to alter the institutional structure of the English department by reversing this hierarchy (6-7), he does call into question the hierarchy's implicit privileging of the consumption of texts over their production. In opposition to this privileging, he proposes to teach literature in a way that makes reading and writing interdependent (8). His pedagogy is based on a sequence of three steps: reading, interpretation, and criticism. In reading the student consumes the text. Interpretation is transitional, the step away from reading to the ultimate stage of criticism. In criticism, the student produces a text against the text read at the initial stage (21-24). Reading, interpretation, criticism — this sequence structures the chapters on classroom pedagogy, and it frames the issues addressed in the chapters on theory. Scholes' commitment to his pedagogyis passionate: "For me the ultimate hell at the end of all our good New Critical 256Rocky Mountain Review intentions is textualized in the image of a brilliant instructor explicating a poem before a class of stupefied students. . . . Our job is not to intimidate students with our own superior textual production; it is to show them the codes upon which all textual production depends, and to encourage their own textual practice" (24-25). How should one assess Scholes' new pedagogy? Raymond Williams' "Crisis in English Studies" (included in Writing and Society) can help. Williams argues that what is at stake in current debates differs from what was at stake in those occasioned by the emergence of New Criticism. During those earlier debates, the question was whether to modify the discipline of English by adding criticism to it. The New Criticism's argument was that criticism was needed — as the lesson of I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism suggested — to specify what entitles a work...