Why I Don't Teach Close Reading

“Every craft makes crooked.”¹

— Nietzsche

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Several years ago, Dartmouth College handed the administration of its Writing Program over to the English department. To the new administrators—scholars trained in literary criticism—it seemed natural and obvious that close reading should become the foundation of a redesigned curriculum. After all, close reading is the technique through which literary studies established itself as a discipline in the early twentieth century, and it profoundly shapes how literary scholars work. Literary scholars are trained to close read; they are taught that interpretation is the highest form of intellectual work; they assess one another on the sophistication, creativity, cleverness, and aptness of their readings. To specialists formed by such training, it was perhaps unimaginable that the teaching of writing might take a form other than an introduction to the practice of close reading. Indeed, they were so confident in this view that they never asked the faculty who actually teach writing at Dartmouth if they had an opinion.

Such experiences of casual disregard are commonplace for writing faculty, who occupy marginal positions within higher education. Although the field of writing studies (which arguably began at Dartmouth College in 1966)² is a distinct discipline with its own graduate programs, journals, and conferences, its practitioners are viewed as a stigmatized caste within higher education. Administrators and tenured faculty alike have long regarded writing instruction as a service industry—necessary, perhaps, but subordinate to the “real” intellectual work of more “legitimate” and prestigious disciplines. These viewpoints have hardened into hierarchy: writing faculty are almost universally contingent, unbenefited, and poorly compensated; their precarious employment itself functions as a persistent institutional statement about the value of the work they do.

While exceptions exist, this condescending view of writing teachers is quite pronounced among tenured and tenure-track English faculty, for whom such work invites invidious distinction and registers as low status (perhaps because it is an all-too-close reminder of where shipwrecked careers in literary studies may wash ashore).³ It is a bitter irony, then, that the faculty with no training in writing studies, no familiarity with its scholarship, no history of valuing its practitioners, and no interest in teaching composition themselves, have been empowered to design the writing curriculum at our institution. Predictably, they have designed it in their own image.

What follows is a critique of the curriculum they made—its theoretical assumptions, its pedagogical consequences, and the lack of process through which it was imposed. I argue that a writing program built exclusively on close reading mistakes a disciplinary practice for a universal pedagogy; that it inhibits the genre awareness and rhetorical flexibility students need for success across disciplinary contexts; that it dramatically narrows both the texts students encounter as subjects of writing and the purposes writing may serve; and that it was introduced in violation of the basic principles of collegiality and academic freedom that are supposed to protect faculty (tenured and non-tenured alike) from exactly this kind of administrative overreach. Although the disregard for composition faculty I have described is very real, what happened was not the result of malice; rather, I believe that it is the result of an administration that could not see past its own professional deformation. And that is, in the end, what makes the current problem so difficult to address: the people responsible for it are, due to the very depth of their specialized training, among the least equipped to recognize it.

Our new curriculum #

Curricular reform is a slow and deliberate undertaking. It begins with a serious assessment of existing practices with a view toward identifying specific pedagogical concerns, and then articulating how a new pedagogy will resolve them. It involves sustained engagement with the relevant scholarly literature—in this case, decades of research in composition studies. It requires an honest evaluation of student outcomes, a meaningful partnership with the teaching faculty, and the kind of extended dialogue that allows a genuine consensus to emerge. It takes time, because it should.

Our reform amounted to something far simpler: a substitution. Everyone’s existing assignments were replaced with a set of prescribed ones, handed down without discussion or explanation. No problem was ever clearly articulated that these assignments were meant to solve; no discussion was had about how the new assignments might produce problems of their own. The underlying philosophy seemed to be that a successful writing course is determined not by the instructor’s judgment, experience, or relationship with students, but by the assignments themselves—that the prompt, in other words, is the real teacher.

If the prompt is to be the real teacher, it is worth asking what it teaches. Here are the assignments in full:

• Essay 1: Take up a single interpretive object (text, image, film, art object, etc) and perform a close reading of this object to generate observations that lead to a difficulty or problematic in the interpretation of this object, making sure to ground your observations in an interpretive context. Develop and advance an idea or argument that originates from the identified interpretive difficulty or problematic.

• Essay 2: Take up at least two interpretive objects (text, image, film art object, etc). Perform a close reading of these objects to generate observations of unobvious differences or similarities that lead to a difficulty or problematic, making sure to ground these observations in an interpretive context. Develop and advance an idea or argument that originates from the identified interpretive difficulty or problematic.

What is initially striking about these assignments is how much they feel like assignments. There is little that seems real or ordinary about the kind of work they stage. The unreality comes, I think, from the attempt to present a particular disciplinary practice as a universal one. Do we really approach a poem, a painting, an editorial, a lab report, a legal brief, all in the same way—each time scanning for the place where the text resists interpretation? When we read, is it always with a view to discover some “unobvious” meaning or connection to some other thing? And if we must focus on difficulties and problems, why only interpretive ones? A text might fail in its logic, its style, its factual accuracy, its practical outcome, its ethical stance; these all seem like perfectly legitimate things to notice and write about. But not here.

Instead, the prompts repeatedly insist that texts may only function as provocations for explication.⁴ The word “interpretive” does a remarkable amount of work across the prompt’s four short sentences. It modifies “object,” “difficulty,” “problematic,” and “context.” And the argument the student is asked to produce must “originate from the identified interpretive difficulty or problematic.” The assignments are not subtle: interpretation of the text is the only game in town. They do not invite students to confront an artifact and then determine what intellectual work or methodology it requires, what kinds of thinking or action it invites, what sorts of things it makes possible. Instead, the assignments prescribe a particular method (close reading), a particular intellectual activity (identifying and resolving interpretive difficulties), and a particular genre of writing—all closely associated with the disciplinary formation of literary studies. Perhaps the tortured formulation and circumlocution on display in these prompts is because their authors are at pains to avoid plainly saying what they mean: write a close reading essay.

Leaning on the recent work of John Guillory, Andrew Goldstone, and Jonathan Kramnick, I will define the genre of “close reading” as a species of commentary produced through the technique of close reading, with the purpose of “showing the work” of interpretation by advancing arguments that use in-sentence quotation exclusively as evidence. Put more simply, a close reading is dedicated to manifesting or performing interpretation; it offers up an explanation of a text’s meaning using nothing but the text itself as defense. I believe this definition is broadly consistent with the work prescribed by our new assignments, which ask students to 1) discover some interpretive crux within a text (or in the nexus of two texts) and 2) resolve this “interpretive difficulty” through an argument that marshals evidence found within the four corners of the text or object. The assignments describe something that any practitioner of literary studies would immediately recognize: find the place in the text where meaning becomes unstable, and write your way through it; interpret the ambiguity using careful attention to the words on the page; make an argument that unifies the text in some creative and novel way. While this technique and genre are foundational to work within literary studies and some neighboring disciplines, they are not common or appropriate in other fields or genres. What the assignments really do, I think, is inculcate students into the practice of literary analysis without explicitly naming it as such.

The administration previously tried to address this critique. In a presentation on the new assignments they wrote: “Hopefully we can see that the language of close-reading is not intended to signal some commitment to the literary or privileging of literary analysis. All texts/objects can and should be close-read. It’s how we practice writing as thinking.” It’s worth pausing and considering this statement. It insists that close reading is not a disciplinary practice but a universal one: any text, in any context, can and should be approached by locating its interpretive difficulties and resolving them through argument. Even though it is a fact that this method is the foundational technique of literary studies, and the genre it produces is recognized everywhere as the signature product of that discipline, we are being asked to believe that this is not evidence of any particular bias. In this tautological presentation we again see a professional deformation: the method feels universal only because the authors equate it with thinking itself. If the aim were really to name a generic practice of careful reading, why reach for a term so tightly bound to the history of literary criticism? A word like “analysis” would travel across disciplinary borders far more easily, without smuggling in a particular tradition’s methodological assumptions. To my mind, these assignments bear the unmistakable imprint of a particular disciplinary formation: a particular set of values about what texts are, what readers do, and what counts as serious intellectual work. They do not merely require students to read closely—they insist that students produce close readings.⁵ And because these prompts are the sole writing curriculum for the entire College, their disciplinary assumptions do not merely shape one course among many—they define, for every student who passes through this institution, what writing and critical thinking are.

The administration might respond that close reading, properly practiced, develops habits of careful attention that students can carry into other disciplinary contexts—that learning to read a poem closely will make a student a better reader of a legal brief or a scientific paper. This is an appealing claim, but it runs counter to what researchers have established about how transfer actually works. There is a rich discourse on the subject of transfer within psychology and learning theory stretching back nearly a century. A significant contribution to this conversation focusing on first-year composition may be found in Elizabeth Wardle’s “‘Mutt Genres’ and the Goal of FYC: Can We Help Students Write the Genres of the University?” Wardle’s study demonstrates that knowledge transfer frequently fails in writing coursework because genres are context-specific; they arise from, and are shaped by, the activities and rhetorical situations of particular disciplines and cannot be meaningfully practiced outside those contexts. When students in a classroom situation are asked to do so, the genres become “pseudotransactional; they no longer do the same work in the world or accomplish clear purposes in response to meaningful exigencies. They become classroom exercises rather than the genres they are” within their disciplinary context (769). Wardle’s most pointed suggestion is also the most directly relevant to our situation. She writes that “we might better serve first-year students by reframing the goals of FYC, such that the course does not promise to teach students to write in the university but rather teaches students about writing in the university (765). A course that teaches students to write produces practitioners of a particular set of conventions; a course that teaches students about writing produces students who understand what conventions are, where they come from, and what work they do in specific disciplinary and rhetorical contexts. The first produces a student who can execute a close reading essay. The second produces a student who knows what a close reading essay is, why it exists, what it assumes, and when it is and is not the right tool. Our curriculum has chosen the first path. And the presentation of a single genre as the universal form of careful thought means students leave not only without genre awareness but without knowing they lack it.⁶

On Objects and Artifacts #

I want to briefly consider how the framing of the prompts will shape how students understand the production of meaning. The prompts oddly and persistently insist on the thingness of texts.⁷ Described exclusively as an “object” or “artifact,” the text is stripped of its character as communication—as the thinking of another person addressed to a reader—and is presented instead as something stable, discrete, and self-contained: something that simply is, awaiting the student’s inspection from a critical distance. The word “object” connotes physical solidity, an objective thing with defined boundaries and inherent properties. The word “artifact” carries a strong archaeological valence suggesting that the reader’s job is to dig carefully, to unearth something valuable hidden beneath the surface. Taken together, these terms promote a picture of meaning as something that lies within the text—a property of the thing itself, something valuable waiting to be extracted.

The verbs in the prompts that describe how the ideal student should perform their work reinforce this understanding. To “identify” something is to locate and name something already known—we identify suspects, pathogens, species. The framing presupposes the existence of the thing we are asked to find. “Originates” performs similar work, suggesting that interpretive difficulty is an inherent feature of the text rather than something that arises in the mind of a reader as a co-production. While I suspect that the authors of these prompts would not argue that meaning is an inherent property of the text, the consistent and unambiguous messaging within the assignments demand otherwise, leaving little room for the student to bring something of herself to the encounter. Her own situation, concerns, and context become incidental to the “real” work of locating some obscure meaning within the four corners of the text.

This objectification works to open a distance between the student and what she reads that the prompts treat as a precondition for serious intellectual work.⁸ The further the text recedes into thingness, the more sovereign the reader appears; but the freedom and agency of the student has a cost. The prompts never encourage the thought of a writer addressing a reader, of one mind reaching toward another across time; they present the text as a found thing, inert and orphaned—something to dissect rather than engage. The student is not asked to listen to someone, to reckon with another consciousness, to be challenged or changed or addressed or moved to action. She is asked to stand apart from a thing and decode it. Our curriculum endlessly emphasizes “writing as thinking,” never as a form of communication or means of personal or social transformation.

We might find an alternative approach in the writings of scholars like Rita Felski, Toril Moi, and Marielle Macé. In The Limits of Critique, for example, Felski writes that we are mistaken to “treat a text as an inert object to be scrutinized rather than a phenomenon to be engaged” (84). In what seems like an explicit rebuke to our curriculum, she writes that the text is not a “geological project,” it is something that acts on us even as we act on it: “Reading, in this sense, is neither a matter of digging below resistant ground nor an equanimous tracing out of textual surfaces. Rather, it is a cocreation . . . that leaves neither party unchanged” (84). Borrowing from Actor Network Theory, she describes reading as a moment when reader and text “become part of a network rather than a self-enclosed dyad . . . . Reading, in this light, is a matter of attaching, collating, negotiating, assembling—of forging links between things that were previously unconnected. It is not a question of plumbing depths . . . but of creating something new in which the reader’s role is as decisive as that of the text. Interpretation becomes a coproduction between actors that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meanings . . .” (173-4). To my mind, Felski presents a valuable vision of reading and writing that our assignments actively resist. When we hand students an assignment that says meaning is in the text and the reader’s job is to extract it, we are not just giving them a method. We are giving them a false picture of where meaning comes from and what reading and writing can be.

On the “unobvious” #

Our prompts insist that students only retrieve “unobvious” meanings from the text. But unobvious to whom? Presumably, to the expert authority who has made the assignment and who will grade it. When students are required to identify a “difficulty” that is “unobvious” and then resolve it for a grade, the assignment inevitably stimulates the student’s desire to find the “right answer” or one deemed “acceptable” to their instructor. Rather than free the student to describe what meanings she finds or experiences (what genuinely strikes her, arrests her, troubles her), the assignment seizes that freedom from the start by strongly implying the existence of a hidden hierarchy of meanings that the uninitiated student is unable to reference. And if this is not the true purpose of this prohibition, then why mention it at all? The hierarchy is nowhere published, nowhere made explicit; it resides solely in the trained intuitions of the instructor—the good close reader.

In these assignments, satisfying the evaluator and following the thought are potentially in opposition. The student knows that her discovered difficulty must be deemed sufficiently difficult, her unobvious observation sufficiently unobvious. But determining what is manifest within a text is not an empirical matter; it is a judgment made relative to a reader’s prior knowledge, experience, and educational training. What strikes a first-year student as genuinely difficult or unobvious may be a commonplace to her teacher. But this gap between the student’s and instructor’s knowledge is not a deficiency to be policed, it is the very space where learning happens. The assignment here seems less interested in promoting exploration and growth than it is in reproducing a certain form of subjectivity: the student is not being taught to read, she is being disciplined into reading just like us.

The relation between teacher and student that the term “unobvious” constructs underlines what I have already described about the nature of the assignments: the view that the “real” difficulties are in the text; that the instructor, by virtue of her training, can see them; and that the student’s job is merely to demonstrate that she can see them too. Thus, the prominent inclusion of the term “unobvious” results in an assignment that, despite its apparent openness, teaches students to orient themselves not toward the text but toward the teacher’s expectations—reading not for meaning but for approval. As a result, I fear, the student must navigate not toward insight but toward the appearance of insight, calibrated to the imagined judgment of the evaluating teacher.

Discipline and genre concerns #

Consider how our close reading-based pedagogy is discipline-bound in ways that may hinder students’ success outside of literary studies and related disciplines. Joanna Wolfe’s work on Comparative Genre Analysis demonstrates that first-year writing instructors—most often drawn from literary studies fields—tend “to view their own discipline’s values, assumptions, and conventions as the norms in other disciplines” (43). This professional deformation frequently results in instructors giving students “incorrect or harmful advice” about the writing that occurs within other disciplines. Wolfe shows how students who are trained exclusively in close reading struggle in other fields like history, biology, and psychology, where writing conventions, evidentiary practices, and rhetorical goals differ significantly. For example: the bold argumentative claims we associate with literary studies are viewed as “too forceful” or lacking humility by history professors (55); and while the technique of close reading is fundamentally based on the incorporation of quotation in the defense of interpretation, biology and psychology students are “explicitly warned . . . against direct quotation” because it suggests a lack of mastery or intellectual laziness within these fields (59). Wolfe’s examples are compelling and numerous, and they recommend a writing program that moves away from an exclusively humanistic approach to the teaching of composition to one that instead cultivates student awareness of genre and how disciplinary practices require different approaches to analysis and writing.

While a concern for student success in other disciplinary contexts is an important consideration, a lack of genre awareness has far more reaching implications. Carolyn Miller’s landmark essay “Genre as Social Action” extends the concern into politics and civics, demonstrating the importance of teaching genre awareness in a first-year writing curriculum. Miller’s critical insight was to redefine genre itself: genres, she argued, are not simply formal features of texts but “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (159). Miller’s point is that genres are not static forms to be filled but things people do with language in order to accomplish some social purpose. When we draft a grant proposal, we are not filling in a template but asking for resources and describing the purpose and value of our proposed endeavors. The genre is an action, not merely a vehicle to transmit it. Additionally, genres are “typified” actions—highly evolved rhetorical practices that encode disciplinary epistemologies. The scientific research article, with its methods/results/discussion structure, embodies a theory of knowledge: claims must be reproducible, methods transparent, data distinguished from interpretation, etc. To learn the genre is to learn what the discipline counts as valid evidence, sound reasoning, legitimate claims to truth.⁹ The same holds for legal briefs, policy memos, historical monographs—each genre teaches its users how knowledge is constructed in that field. And finally, genres are evoked in response to “recurrent situations,” so learning a genre requires learning to recognize a particular social situation and understanding how the genre provides a way of productively engaging or intervening in it. (See also Carter, Russell, Smit, Soliday).

Miller’s framework illuminates precisely what goes wrong when we teach close reading as though it were writing itself rather than one genre among many. While students learn to perform a “reading” for a particular scholarly community, they do not learn to recognize it as one sort of action among many possible ones. They never develop the ability to recognize rhetorical situations that call for other genres: the proposal, the editorial, the political advocacy piece, etc. Obviously, and in fairness, no single writing course can adequately prepare a student for every writerly situation or disciplinary convention, and there are a great many benefits to asking students to close read and even compose close readings; however, our program’s uncompromising commitment to a single genre and form of analysis is inappropriate, especially since our students will largely not pursue study in the humanities (I take no joy in stating this).

On methods and subjects #

Our exclusive use of the technique of close reading exercises a profound influence on the sorts of texts or artifacts that instructors may choose for use in their classrooms. While the prompts are presented as open and universally applicable, they are really only appropriate for work in fields that use the technique of close reading. In “Against Close Reading,” Peter Rabinowitz describes how our commitment to a particular critical methodology ends up determining the subject of our analysis. We choose texts that “we can do things with,” “congenial texts” that work well with the “technique” we use for our analysis (233). In other words, we choose artifacts for our teaching largely because they help us close read or teach close reading, and we avoid texts that would prove frustrating for this enterprise. While our curriculum doesn’t mandate that readings be drawn from a particular subject matter or genre of text, it does require a particular method of analysis and genre of writing, which has a similar result. Many texts do not invite interpretation in the way literary works do, and there are many other valuable ways of reading, interpreting, analyzing, and writing that we would not call close reading. As Rabinowitz argues, “Reading . . . is a very general term for a vast number of significantly different kinds of activity. But by privileging close reading we profoundly reduce this multiplicity” (232). Indeed, many approaches to texts become impossible if the only value is manifesting the interpretation of some difficult passage(s) contained within it (and some of these approaches have been explicitly forbidden from use in our classrooms). So telling your faculty “you can choose whatever texts you want” doesn’t really work out to be such an ecumenical gesture because the technique of close reading forces you to treat everything as if it were literature or provides a powerful incentive to choose literature as the artifact for the analysis.

Evidence for this concern is observable in the writing program’s model prompts for our shared essay assignments. It is telling that all but one of the model assignments for Essay 2 use literature or film for their textual artifacts. And while these prompts describe reasonable projects so long as students are asked to confront texts that are customary within literary analysis (Louise Erdrich’s short story “Fleur,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the film Captain Fantastic), things break down in the one example drawn from a different, nonliterary discipline. The prompt to close read texts from the discipline of sports science, I think, shows a very poor fit between the mandated analytical approach of close reading and what John Frow describes as the “regulative frame” of this particular genre of text. The prompt reads:

Perform a close reading of . . . two recent peer-reviewed perspectives on the inclusion of women with hyperandrogenism in women’s sports. Identify unobvious differences or similarities between the two main readings that lead to a difficulty or problem and in your essay develop an idea or argument that originates from it.¹⁰

Why must the student close reading “unobvious” differences or similarities between these texts rather than rhetorically engage the plain arguments, evidence, and ethical concerns articulated in the articles concerning efforts to define what a so-called “normal” woman is? A scientific article about hyperandrogenism in women’s sports is not an “object” awaiting the student’s interpretive ingenuity; it is itself an explanation, embedded in the conventions of a discipline, responding to a particular scientific and ethical situation, participating in an ongoing conversation with identifiable stakes. To understand the text is to understand that network—the genre it inhabits, the evidence it marshals, the audience it addresses, the actions it prescribes or opposes. Close reading, which brackets all of this in favor of untangling a text’s semantic difficulties, is not just one approach among many; it is an approach that actively prevents the student from understanding what the text is about.

A student responding to this assignment might discover some clever distinction between the two articles, earning a good grade. But she would not engage what is actually at stake in the conversation: the lived experience of the athletes whose identity and eligibility is being debated, the scientific evidence about performance advantage, or the ethical principles that should govern inclusion. She would mistake textual ambiguity for actual disagreement, and interpretive novelty for civic participation. The demand for “unobvious differences or similarities” treats interpretive cleverness as the sole measure of intellectual rigor; it privileges interpretive novelty over the determination of credibility and practical consequence. While these are precisely the values that underlie the work of literary criticism, they are clearly not appropriate in every discipline or genre of writing. While this teacher is gamely trying her best to translate a previous assignment into the language of the required prompt, the resulting directive reveals how the approach required by our curriculum isn’t always an appropriate fit for work in other disciplines.

Writing and politics #

Essay 1: Take up this report about the wholesale slaughter of children in Gaza and perform a close reading of this object to generate observations that lead to a difficulty or problematic in the interpretation of this object, making sure to ground your observations in an interpretive context. Develop and advance an idea or argument that originates from the identified interpretive difficulty or problematic.

Confining students to interpretation and close reading isn’t merely a pedagogical choice—it’s also an ethical and political one, especially when the text before them demands some form of action. Imagine that we presented students with a contemporary public policy paper arguing that we should outlaw all gender-affirming care; would it be appropriate to limit the students’ responses to interpretation and the genre of close reading? Because upon reading this text a student might feel compelled to write a response promoting an alternative thesis supported by a totally different set of facts rather than make her focus the explication of some portion of the text at hand. The student might feel obliged to take on the paper as a whole by systematically critiquing its arguments and evidence, and by imagining the future that would result if the policy were implemented by the current or a future administration. The student might communicate to her audience how the policy paper attempts to effectuate a discriminatory social condition that she believes is illegal and unethical, and she might further seek to discredit the individuals who wrote it by revealing their previous record of bigotry and contempt for human possibilities outside of their narrow view.

This response we’re imagining would require a great many things beyond mere interpretation and close reading, would it not? That’s because this policy paper isn’t some trivial intellectual plaything to be puzzled over in a moment of leisure, but an effort to alter our world by threatening people and institutions and values we love. The text provokes a completely different response than the one imagined in our prompts. Our student isn’t happy with merely interpreting some of the words in the text in some unique and impressive way; she feels compelled to do something with her own. Indeed, merely interpreting some difficult passage from this text would not help us resist the individuals who produced it—it would actually be a form of assistance to them. In distinction to the close reading genre, the occasion of the response we’re imagining here would emerge from the broad aims of the artifact and the exigency it produces—not some small, perplexing feature internal to it; and the purpose of our writing would be a response to the real, material changes the paper attempts to effect in our world, not a mere opportunity to practice deep textual analysis. In other words, our student would view her writing as a mediator of real, material change in the world, not an attempt to meditate on some perplexing semantic problem within the dark folds of someone else’s writing. To be sure, in order to perform the rhetorical analysis and make the argument we’re imagining here, we’d still have to do some very close reading, but we wouldn’t be making a close reading—the genre of this required writing assignment. To echo Miller’s thinking again, by confining students to one genre, we confine them to one type of social action, one way of responding to the discursive situations they encounter. Some texts call not for interpretation but for resistance or action, and confining students to close reading denies them the means to answer that call.

In consideration of our present political moment, as the United States is held hostage by an increasingly lawless, illiberal, anti-democratic, and flagrantly bigoted regime, we should think seriously about the political dimensions of teaching writing. When Karl Rove infamously told journalist Ron Suskind “We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do,” he demonstrated the relevance of a critique that Terry Eagleton offered long ago that “close reading” is “a recipe for political inertia, and thus for submission to the political status quo” (43). I don’t think that we should invite students to imagine that writing is merely about interpretation or explication—where we say “this means X,” taking things no further. What is to be done about X? Is X a good idea? Is X wrong or unethical? Interpretation for the sake of interpretation is a recipe for political quiescence, where all our energies are wasted on parasitic critique. Just say the words “I will defeat Donald Trump with my close readings” and hear how hollow it sounds.¹¹

Writing as doing #

What if our curriculum considered writing as a form of doing and not just thinking? What if we treated writing as a form of acting in and on the world through discourse? What if we helped students see that words inspire action, communicate plans, produce consensus, influence others—how words can accomplish things, disrupt things, put things in motion? As Lloyd Bitzer once famously wrote, a “work of rhetoric is pragmatic; it comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself; it functions ultimately to produce action or change in the world; it performs some task. In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action. The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change” (3-4).

A curriculum informed by such thinking would help students understand that writing is not merely the practice of explication, but a way of disclosing the world anew, of actualizing possibilities, of responding to the demands that texts—and the world—place upon us. It is hard to appreciate how writing might function this way when one is limited to writing as close reading—as though the only question worth asking were “what does this mean?” rather than “what does this make possible?” or “what does this demand of us now?”

On collegiality and academic freedom #

As I near the end, I want to be clear about what I am not objecting to. I’m not arguing that faculty should be able to “do anything they want.” I understand that a writing program needs coordination to produce coherence. And our accreditation requires that we articulate learning outcomes, design practices to achieve them, and gather evidence to determine whether they are successful. I believe this work is critically important. For example, I believe that student workloads should be broadly similar across sections in the interest of fairness. I also think we should elaborate values about teaching, pedagogical principles, best practices, goals, etc. However, and this is key, these are things that only emerge from a long, dialectical process of consensus-seeking rooted in dialogue and meetings and workshops and experimentation and research and peer review. They cannot be handed down by whoever currently occupies the writing program directorship — a position that tends to be filled not by those who sought it but by those who could not avoid it.

Our required prompts were not developed through an inclusive process. The writing faculty were not consulted on their creation. There were no meaningful opportunities to discuss, contest, or refine them. No drafts were circulated for discussion. There were no invitations for revision. They merely arrived as faits accomplis. At the time I found this an appalling lack of collegiality and respect; but the more I consider it, I also believe it to be a violation of academic freedom itself.¹²

What does it mean when the people employed to perform an important task are not considered competent informants on how best to do it? The decision to sideline the writing faculty in the design of their own courses makes some painful truths about our situation difficult to avoid. Our professional judgment is not trusted or valued. And if our expertise does not count when shaping the learning experiences of our own students, what is our real value to this institution? The answer is that we are valued not for what we know, but for how well we follow orders.

Conclusion #

I set out to articulate several things that I’ve thought about over the past few years. I’ve argued that a curriculum rooted exclusively in interpretation and close reading constrains rather than cultivates student thinking; it treats a disciplinary practice as universal pedagogy; it prevents the genre awareness and rhetorical flexibility students need for success in other disciplines; it dramatically narrows the sorts of texts students encounter as subjects of writing and analysis; it fails to help students understand writing and discourse as forms of agency; and it was imposed without faculty consultation in violation of basic principles of respect and academic freedom.

A curriculum that trusted instructors would not need to be this controlling; it would set goals and leave room for professional judgment about how to meet them. A prompt that trusted instructors would not need to specify method, activity, genre, and even the kind of difficulty the student is permitted to notice. I recommend we start over and create a curriculum developed through authentic dialogue—one that treats close reading as one valuable tool among many rather than thinking itself. A writing curriculum informed by such thinking would look fundamentally different than our current approach. While close reading doubtlessly offers valuable analytical skills, a curriculum centered exclusively on this technique imposes a limited, discipline-specific conception of writing.

None of what has happened should surprise us. When the Writing Program was handed over to the English department, it was perhaps inevitable that the technique that founded literary studies would become the cornerstone of the curriculum. But what is foundational within one discipline is unsuitable in others. And if we are not attuned to how our professional deformations blind us, then we risk producing students who fail to see as well. A first-year writing course serves students heading into biology, economics, engineering, political science, medicine, computer science, and many other fields. We should help students develop an awareness of how disciplinary conventions, genres, and rhetorical situations shape knowledge production and writing practices. And we should further help students understand and practice writing as a form of agency and a mediator of change. Close reading is a valuable technique, but a writing program that does nothing else teaches students that their job is to decode the world, not to change it.

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• Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 1, no. 1, 1968, pp. 1–14.
• Connor, Steven. “Spelling Things Out.” New Literary History, vol. 45, no. 2, 2014, pp. 183–97.
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