Community Of Writers Research Articles

Mark Twain & company: six literary relations

In this comparison of Twain with six of his literary contemporaries, Leland Krauth looks anew at the writer's multifaceted creativity. Twain, a highly lettered man immersed in the literary culture of his time, viewed himself as working within a community of writers. He likened himself to a guild member whose work was the crafted product of a common trade--and sometimes made with borrowed materials.Yet there have been few studies of Twain in relation to his fellow guild members. In Mark Twain & Company, Krauth examines some creative sparks and smolderings ignited by Twain's contact with certain writers, all of whom were published, read, and criticized on both sides of the Atlantic: the Americans Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Harriet Beecher Stowe and the British writers Matthew Arnold, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling.Each chapter explores the nature of Twain's personal relationship with a writer as well as the literary themes and modes they shared. Krauth looks at the sentimentality of Harte and Twain and its influence on their protest fiction; the humor and social criticism of Twain and Howells; the use of the Gothic by Twain and Stowe to explore racial issues; the role of Victorian Sage assumed by Arnold and Twain to critique civilization; the exploitation of adventure fiction by Twain and Stevenson to reveal conceptions of masculinity; and the use of the picaresque in Kipling and Twain to support or subvert imperialism.Mark Twain & Company casts new light on some of the most enduring writers in English. At the same time it refreshes the debate over the transatlantic nature of Victorianism with new insights about nineteenth-century morality, conventionality, race, corporeality, imperialism, manhood, and individual identity.

A Common Ground? Book Prize Culture in Europe

This article argues that research into literary prizes can potentially be extremely pertinent in the understanding of the material and ideological conditions of the production and reception of literature and literary value. As such, the analysis of prizes awarded is similar to the wider project of book history and publishing studies, and in their fusion of cultural and economic capital, literary prizes are thus part of the larger environment in which books are produced, distributed and consumed. Through an examination of the impact of eligibility requirements and the reception of prize-winning books, particularly within the European context, this article examines the vital role of prizes in the creation of communities of writers and the development of communities of readers. The article considers a variety of methodologies for the study of literary prizes. It calls for an analysis both quantitative and qualitative, and that pays attention to both the histories and development of individual prizes, and the wider negotiations book prize culture makes with the publishing industries and culture in general, both on the “common ground” of European and global prize cultures, and in its regional and national differences.

Response to Stannard

Kevin Stannard's commentary provides further evid ence of the need to connect academic geography to the wider community of geographers. Stannard seeks to engage and extend a theme I identified in 'Geography as the world discipline' (Bonnett 2003), i.e. the lack of active involvement of geography academics in school education. The portrait he offers is essential reading for university geographers, many of whom have only the dimmest sense of geography teachers' struggle to maintain the discipline. Readers of both Stannard's comment and my article will notice many shared aspirations. They will also encounter a certain disconnection of aspirations. Both of us appear to be looking to the other for assistance. Stannard offers a depiction of school geography as intellectually moribund and wants the intellectual dynamism of academic geography to be disseminated into the secondary curriculum. In contrast, I argued that academic geography has become increasingly parochial and needs to become far more open to the international concerns and agendas that animate so much interest in the discipline outside higher education. These interpretations are not entirely con tradictory, but they might cause us to pause before we throw our respective babies out with our respective bathwaters. Infanticide apart, at the heart of the debate on the role and future of geography is the issue of progres sion. Evangelizing missions to schools spreading the word about geography will count for little if univer sity geography does not engage, develop and chal lenge the kind of geographical knowledge that students bring to their first year of undergraduate study. In order to do this, it is necessary to have an intimate sense of what that knowledge is and how it is taught. However, my article was also trying to make a broader point: that geography exceeds the education system. It has a wide cultural base and incorporates a diverse community of writers, readers and practitioners who are engaged with international and environmental concerns. Stannard takes a mild swipe at what he sees as my failure to sufficiently distinguish school geography from journalistic geo graphy, suggesting that this puts 'A level geography on a par with knowledge and perspectives gained from the odd newspaper article or a Discovery Channel documentary'. There is, admittedly, something clumsy about the sweeping and inclusive way I employed the term 'popular geography' in my earlier article. However, this sprawling category had a serious intellectual purpose, namely to open up our delibera tions on the nature of the field to a much wider sense of geography as part of the modern experience. This broader perspective enables us to see that students come into university geography not merely with the specific knowledge of another formal curriculum, but with an interest in and expectations of geography de veloped from multiple sources. These sources may include the geographical media, as well as other experiences, such as 'the gap year' and environ mental activism, that are felt to be establishing geo graphical knowledge. University geography needs to be able to recognize and engage this wider discip linary context if it is to claim a key role in public life. Stannard's horror at the idea that an A-level in geography could be dropped as a prerequisite for university entry is understandable and, in large part, appropriate. It still appears that the fates of university and school geography are inextricable. However, my argument also suggests that geography could and should do far more to sell itself to a wider constitu ency; that those who are passionate about the dis cipline can come from many different quarters and should not be confronted and rejected by a rigidly institutional interpretation of the nature of intellectual progression in the subject.

The Value of Art in the English Classroom: Imagination, Making the Tacit Visible

This author describes how a “foray into the world of art” provides her students with a clear language to talk about their reading and writing, ultimately transforming her classroom into a community of writers, readers, and thinkers.

Women Naming Women: The Use of Sobriquets by Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Katherine Philips

AbstractSobriquets were commonly used by British writers of the late 16th and 17th centuries. The sobriquets chosen by Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Katherine Philips, the three central women poets of the period, their literary sources, and their associations and significance are discussed. Each of the three writers names herself and her friends and in so doing transcends the alternatives of invisibility or notoriety, apparently the only choices available to women writers of the time. By using sobriquets, the writers identify themselves and their friends as inhabitants of a different and unorthodox world, but one which includes recognition as writers and as members of a community of writers.

The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers' Workshop: Forty-Three Stories, Recollections, and Essays on Iowa's Place in Twentieth-Century Literature/A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop/The Eleventh Draft: Craft and…

The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers' Workshop: Forty-Three Stories, Recollections, and Essays on Iowa's Place in Twentieth-Century Literature/A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop/The Eleventh Draft: Craft and…

When Community Fails to Transform: Raveling and Unraveling a “Community of Writers”

This paper examines the importance of the notion of community in the practices of a remedial writing class at an urban university. Although labeled by their teacher as a “community of writers” this group did not write, and its members were judged by their university as failed writers. Their story illustrates the high value placed on the idea of community in school, its vulnerable nature and the fundamental conditions necessary to building its resilience. Implications for the role of community in remediation in higher education are noted in light of the failure of this group to form and sustain practices of community that might have supported their becoming successful writers.

Approaches to the Writing of Cases: experiences with preservice Master of Teaching students

During the final phase of their first year, preservice students in the Master of Teaching programme at the University of Sydney are required to write their own case stories from experience. This process serves to help them make individual and collective sense of what has occurred in the course of their initial six week practicum, which was preceded by 20 weeks of intensive coursework based on several forms of case methodology. Through a carefully constructed writing workshop, the university teacher writes along with the seminar group members, thereby facilitating sharing, discussion and the conferencing of individual cases as they unfold. The collegial environment of a ‘community of writers’ established in this way operates as a support for neophyte teachers. In the short term, it provides a forum for articulating teaching dilemmas and reflecting upon their actions and decision taking. Longer term, it serves to enhance the potential for growth as these intending teachers begin to think constructively about their work in schools.

Knowledge, Social Relations, and Authority in Collaborative Practices of the 1930s and the 1950s

laborative pedagogy has many current proponents, of whom probably the most influential is Kenneth Bruffee, who calls his method collaborative learning. In Bruffee's method, described in his textbook A Short Course in Writing, students interact both in small group discussions and in a series of written peer critiques. Another influential form of group work in composition studies is described in Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers, along with his more recent A Community of Writers, coauthored with Pat Belanoff. In Elbow and Belanoff's work, the group is conceived as a support system for individual creativity. Focusing more broadly on all levels of education, Robert Slavin at Johns Hopkins and David Johnson and Roger Johnson at the University of Minneapolis offer different

The Value of Written Peer Criticism

When I talk to graduate students and colleagues about their use of collaborative learning, I often hear stories about when it doesn't work. No one's version of collaborative pedagogy is universally rewarding, of course, but I have found some approaches consistently more successful than others. Often, peer criticism consists of oral or hastily written comments by students in a classroom group; sometimes students fill out a checklist or a form that resembles a short-answer test (for example Huff and Kline 122-23). In these cases, neither teacher nor student is taking peer criticism seriously as a writing exercise. Furthermore, much oral or checklist peer criticism is limited to students' evaluations of their peers' writing techniques, thus neglecting discussion of the substantive issues in the paper. Finally, much peer criticism focuses either on the subjective experience of the critic, such as Peter Elbow's movies of people's minds while they read your words (Writing without Teachers 77), or objectified standard criteria, such as his criterion-based feedback (Writing with Power 240-45). I would like to propose a melding of exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book Sharing and Responding with the series of written peer critiques Kenneth Bruffee describes in his text A Short Course in Writing. These two kinds of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom because together they capture the struggle between individual expression and social constraint that most of us experience as writers. Sharing and Responding can function on its own or as a companion piece to Elbow and Belanoff's A Community of Writers (second edition forthcoming), with which it was published. The exercises continue the tradition of readerbased responding that Elbow began in Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, but with a twist. The exercises in Sharing and Responding have a more developed social framework than their earlier manifestations. Although the emphasis is still on the writer's making individual choices, the structure of group interaction is more clearly developed than in Elbow's earlier work. For instance, each exercise has sample reader responses followed by a section called What a Writer Might Think about This Feedback. These exercises (as well as other subjective or comment-based-rather than essay-length-peer criticism)

Balancing Acts: Essays on the Teaching of Writing in Honor of William F. Irmscher

At a time when the study of composition seems especially prone to excess and imbalanceheading toward what could be a tyrannizing theoretical orderhere is a call back to the center, to the concreteness of the teaching moment itself.In a festschrift to honor William F. Irmscher, director for twenty-three years of the University of Washington composition program, the editors outline the need for a among theories and between theory and teaching. This balancing act is a tribute to Irmscher, who counseled compromise and the resolution of conflicting viewpoints. Irmscher could reconcile new ideas with the practical struggles of student writers and composition teachers. As a theorist, Irmscher was one of the first to bring theoretical rigor to composition studies, yet he always strove to express the issueshowever complexin clear and fluid language.The two parts of the text invoke the balancing act between the concerns of the students and the concerns of the teachers. The first part, Identity and Community, presents six essays about helping students explore their identities as writers and the effectiveness of those identities within communities of writers. The second part, Intuition and Institution, includes five essays focusing on the dynamics of teachers decision making about theory and pedagogy within their own institutional communities. The last chapter examines Irmscher s life and writings.This celebration of William F. Irmscher is a celebration of the complexity and the humanness of the act of composing and of the student writers themselves, who are at the heart of this whole enterprise.

Creating a Community of Writers: The Computers and Writing Instruction Project

Creating a Community of Writers: The Computers and Writing Instruction Project

Becoming a Community of Writers: Life Book Writing

Becoming a Community of Writers: Life Book Writing

The Social Construction of Written Communication

This volume examines the role of social factors in the nature and development of written communication. Unlike previous works, the volume is dedicated to examining the ways in which written communication affects and is affected by the community of writers and readers who produce and interpret written language. It focuses on the extent to which writing depends upon principles of social context that are posited for language in general. Intended for both researchers and teachers in language, composition, education, and communication, the volume draws together a number of distinguished scholars in linguistics, communication, education, anthropology, and sociology. It offers theoretical and applied perspectives on aspects of written communication that share in the social foundations of language.

"A Community of Writers": Collaborative Writing for the Organization

"A Community of Writers": Collaborative Writing for the Organization

Word Processing in a Community of Writers

Word Processing in a Community of Writers

Applied Word Processing: Notes on Authority, Responsibility, and Revision in a Workshop Model

The popularity of word processing in the teaching of writing offers an opportunity to reinvent the workshop classroom model in the context of the new technology. The combination of lecture and discussion, of reading assignments and writing assignments allocated to two or three weekly meetings, has been the legacy of the days when composition was indistinguishable from introductory literature, or stylistics, or some other subject-matter course. But inasmuch as composition is a skill requiring more practice than anything else, it is best taught according to a workshop model, which allocates time for writing and revising, for brainstorming, freewriting, and rehearsing, for exchanging drafts and evaluating the audience, for consulting and polishing-in short, for active participation by all students in the writing process itself. Moreover, when writers perform such activities in a room full of computers, rather than in solitary confinement, they form a community in which their work becomes a public act. This community of writers provides a nearly ideal setting for collaborative learning, enabling freshman composition courses to liberate students from the idea that what they write is for teachers to evaluate. Writing for various purposes and audiences in the future will demand of them keen independent judgment-a skill that can be practiced through collaborative efforts such as group brainstorming, peer evaluation, and the agony of being misunderstood even by peers; much professional writing is altogether collaborative. In the word-processing classroom and laboratory everyone's work is, so to speak, on display electronically or in print, inviting the contributions of others and requiring the author to not only revise but to judge and revise. All of this reinforces the idea that writing is a social activity rather than fulfillment of a bizarre requirement in basic literacy. Even more reinforcement comes if faculty members use the same equipment and can be observed going through the same struggles with thought and language. A room full of word-processing computers not only brings writers together,

Freshman Interview: Discovering a Community of Writers at Work

Freshman Interview: Discovering a Community of Writers at Work