2019 Presidential Address: Re-visioning Language, Texts, and Theories
The Presidential Address was delivered at the 2019 MLA Annual Convention in Chicago by Anne Ruggles Gere, then president of the association. An audio recording and the text of her speech, which was introduced by Executive Director Paula M. Krebs, appear here. The address also appears in the May 2019 issue of PMLA.
I attended my first MLA convention in Chicago, in 1973. A frugal graduate student, I stayed at a nearby YMCA but huddled in the evenings with a friend from graduate school in the Palmer House lobby where we shared, surreptitiously, a flask of bourbon and laments about the awful job market. I could never have imagined that forty-five years later I would be delivering the presidential address. During the years since that Chicago convention, I have worked with the executive director Phyllis Franklin, who invited me and a few others to think with her about how the MLA might accommodate what we then called composition and rhetoric. I have worked with Rosemary Feal, who became the executive director as I joined the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee and who left the MLA shortly after persuading me to stand for election to the office of second vice president. In my participation on task forces, division committees, the Publications Committee, the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee, the Executive Council, and most recently as an officer, I have been continually impressed by the talent, commitment, and resourcefulness of those who work for the MLA. I am grateful to belong to an association with such an excellent staff, and I want to offer special thanks to my friend Paula Krebs, whose first full year as executive director coincided with my term as president. Her keen intelligence, administrative skill, and fierce advocacy for our profession convince me that the MLA is in very good hands.
In 1973, my husband and our small daughter stayed at home as I drove our family’s blue station wagon to Chicago to learn about the MLA. I had not planned to get a PhD. After finishing my BA, I went straight into an MA program that prepared me to be an English teacher and after that I taught in high school classrooms for several years. The National Council of Teachers of English was my professional association, and the only thing I knew about the MLA, besides its handbook, was that its convention had a reputation as a meat market for job seekers. During the 1973 convention I saw young men and women in suits make frantic calls on the hotel’s house phones and cut in front of each other in line for the elevator. In her presidential address that year, Florence Howe said, “as the year has worn on and the mail I have had from job-seekers has grown more desperate, I have thought about abandoning my subject and reading from that correspondence” (434). So even though I was not ready to look for a job, I understood that academic employers were not anxiously awaiting my application. I could enumerate the sad similarities between that job market and the present one, but I resist rehearsing bad news.
After completing my PhD I could have returned to the high school classrooms where I enjoyed teaching, but that visit to the MLA convention, combined with my graduate school experience, opened new worlds. My BA and MA prepared me to teach British and American literature but gave me few insights for helping students who struggled with writing. I could assign writing, but I could not teach it. In other words, I arrived at tonight’s occasion by way of a teaching challenge that has led to a career-long study of writing. When I began graduate school, Edward P. J. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student had been published but had not yet entered the curriculum, and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology appeared a few years later, so both these perspectives on writing remained outside my experience. As a result, in graduate school my route to writing studies passed through the territory of literacy, which at the time meant thinking about the relation between writing and speaking. The so-called great divide theory, as proposed by Jack Goody and, later, by Walter J. Ong and by David R. Olsen and Nancy Torrance, positioned writing as an entirely portable and autonomous skill, completely separate from orality. I challenged this theory in my dissertation by examining the use of orality in West African fiction, so I felt vindicated when it gave way to the richer theories of Brian Street, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, Shirley Brice Heath, and Deborah Brandt, who showed how social contexts shape literacy. Still, thinking about literacy as a graduate student gave me a way to see how writing connected the literature I loved with the composition classes I was learning to teach. The word literacy encompasses both reading and writing, and, as more recent scholars like Thomas P. Miller and Jean Ferguson Carr have argued, the concept of literacy could encompass the categories of literature and composition. Carr suggests that literacy can be a theoretical frame that articulates a new relation between literature and writing studies. Miller takes a more comprehensive view, arguing that divisions in English departments could be ameliorated by reconceiving English studies as literacy studies (250). But long before Carr or Miller, I had imagined literacy as a capacious space where reading and writing could support and nurture each other.
Literacy, then, occupied much of my thinking in 1973, and Howe’s presidential address, titled “Literacy and Literature,” reinforced my scholarly interest in literacy. But her speech also showed that the term literacy cannot provide the theoretical grounding for addressing our profession’s divided concepts of reading and writing. As Howe traced the wildly divergent connotations of literacy—including assimilation into the culture of the United States; nonliterary, remedial pedagogies; and the power to “name the world”—I realized this term could incite controversy as easily as it could inspire collaboration (438).
But Howe’s presidential address offered another framework, which I find more useful than literacy for thinking about the current state of our profession. She quoted Adrienne Rich’s description of “re-vision”: “The act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (Rich 18). As you may know, Rich wrote her now-classic “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision” for the MLA Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession and read it at the 1971 convention. The piece was subsequently published in College English and in many collections thereafter. As Rich puts it, re-vision is “more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” It is also a drive for self-knowledge, a refusal of self-destructiveness, and a radical critique of “how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see—and therefore live—afresh” (18).
I want to argue that Rich suggests a way to reorient our field’s vexed approaches to the relation between reading and writing, specifically the underconceptualization of reading by colleagues in writing studies and of writing by colleagues in literary studies. Rich suggests a way of re-visioning the language that has both trapped and liberated us and has thereby shaped the ways we imagine ourselves as a profession and as an association. Many of the key terms in our lexicon exemplify what Ann E. Berthoff calls “killer dichotomies”: reading versus writing, research versus teaching, theory versus instrumentalism (13). Following Rich, I want to re-vision the reading-writing dichotomy with the goal of eliminating the confusions it engenders in students, the bitterness it can create in and among colleagues, and the damage it does to our institutions. Toward this end I discuss the sources of this divisiveness and then highlight the transactional theory of language articulated by Louise Rosenblatt as a resource for ameliorating the difficulties inherent in the reading-writing dichotomy.
I turn first to the forty professors of French, German, and English who in 1883 waded through the December slush in New York City to attend the meeting where they created the Modern Language Association and positioned themselves in opposition to classicists. The meeting of that group drew strength from a speech titled “A College Fetich,” given by Charles Francis Adams at Harvard College’s commencement earlier that year. A successful attorney and a Harvard alumnus, Adams railed against the college’s Latin and Greek curriculum, claiming that Harvard “fail[ed] properly to fit its graduates for the work they had to do in the actual life that awaited them” because it required students “to devote the best part of [their] school lives to acquiring a superficial knowledge of two dead languages” (5, 7). Adams lamented that Harvard did not prepare its students “to pass a really searching examination in English literature and English composition,” and he claimed that individuals who lack command of at least German and French “stand at a great and always recurring disadvantage” (8, 14). The professors who met in the December after Adams’s speech were emboldened by his invitation to offer an alternative to the classical curriculum, but they knew they faced a formidable challenge in proposing that the study of vernacular languages stand alongside, or even replace, the long-standing and prestigious study of classical languages. Taking up Adams’s call to prepare students “for the work they had to do in the actual life that awaited them” would lead to accusations of narrow vocationalism, so they turned their attention to emulating the rigor associated with learning the classical languages.
The relation of the modern languages to the classics has changed over the years, but the aspiration toward rigor, borrowed from classics, has remained a guiding force in our field. The focus on rigor was motivated in part by the concept of professionalism that emerged in the United States just as the MLA was taking shape.1 During the unsettled years of the late nineteenth century, authoritative knowledge replaced aristocratic patronage and the possession of property as the basis of cultural authority and enabled the MLA’s founders to translate their specialized knowledge into academic standing and value in the wider culture. Furthermore, because professors of modern languages in the late nineteenth century wanted the status that classics enjoyed, they saw its rigor as a means to that end. A. Marshall Elliott argued, “The modern languages should be thoroughly disciplinary from the start” (qtd. in Executive Secretary 27–28). Alonzo Williams said that the modern languages “should be made as difficult and solid as mathematics, Greek, or Latin” (qtd. in Executive Secretary 28). And in 1892, Francis A. March noted proudly that “[t]he early professors had no recondite learning applicable to English, and did not know what to do with classes in it. They can now make English as hard as Greek” (xxi). In the late nineteenth century, rigor in the study of modern languages meant increasing the MLA’s emphasis on philology and, in 1903, disestablishing its “Pedagogical Section” (Executive Secretary 33).
In distancing itself from “talk about teaching and enrollment,” the MLA made its attention to rigorous research more visible (33). By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the focus on scholarly rigor had put modern languages on an equal footing with the classics, but the push for rigor continued through the twentieth century. In 1927 the association’s statement of purpose was changed from “the advancement of the study of the modern languages and their literatures” to “the advancement of research” in these fields (36). The next revision of the MLA’s statement of purpose, published in 1962, read, “The object of the association shall be to promote study, criticism, and research in modern languages and their literatures” (“Constitution” 39). The introduction of the word criticism reflected the waning of philology and the increasing efforts to define rigor by way of systematic methods, to define the field of literary study in terms that highlighted its difference from fields like philosophy or history, and to render the humanities more substantial. Emphasis on a rigor based in the knowledge of specific methods and terms gave status and authority to both the MLA and its members.
The pursuit of rigor took a slightly different form in the late twentieth century, as theory assumed a prominent position in the study of modern languages. John Guillory explains that the emergence of a professional managerial class in the United States, coupled with the “technobureaucratic restructuring of the university,” led to “a fetishization of ‘rigor’” (xii). Much of our profession turned to theory for its methodological rigor. I say “much of our profession” because at the same time that deconstruction and its critique of the relation between text and meaning emerged from Derrida’s Of Grammatology, another constituency in our profession was rethinking the possibility that the classics could contribute to writing instruction, as suggested by Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. As a result the departments to which we all belong, both English and other languages, have, during the past four or five decades, become divided into two bodies, one focused on the work of critical literary theory and another on the work of our students.
Guillory describes the consequences of this division: “If deconstructive theory did not provide an enduring rationale for literary study, that was in part because it was incapable of seeing the relation between its practice of supplementing the literary syllabus at the level of the graduate school, and composition’s practice of displacing it at the entry level of university study” (264). I disagree with Guillory’s claim that composition displaced literary study; rather, it looked at literature as writing. But I do agree with his claim that the focus on rigor in the form of theory has led us to a place where the language that carries the greatest social capital is produced by students in composition courses rather than in literature courses, resulting in what he describes as a new “political question”: “What is the systemic relation between the syllabus of composition and the syllabus of theory?” (264).
Guillory raised this question twenty-five years ago, and it remains relevant today. Although he frames it in political terms, his question can also be seen in theoretical terms, and I perceive it as an invitation to, in Rich’s terms, take a new critical direction and re-vision the languages of composition and literature. Guillory suggests a way forward by asserting the importance of linguistic capital, observing that students “who regard composition as a necessary prerequisite for entry into professional life know this, without knowing what it is that they know,” which is that they see writing classes as offering paradigms for the “New Class sociolect” (81, 80). Re-visioning the conflict between the literary syllabus and the composition syllabus, I propose a theoretical frame that casts a new light on both. I turn first to the work of Gertrude Buck and then to that of Rosenblatt for illumination.
In his 1907 presidential address, titled “The Genesis of Speech,” Fred Newton Scott, the only other specialist in composition or writing studies to serve as president of the MLA, describes language in terms of its evolution from a life-serving function focused on individual survival to a society-serving function that attends to others. Scott describes a shift from using words to seize and appropriate to using words to respond and cooperate. His vision of the society-serving function of language was taken up by Buck, Scott’s student and the first woman in the United States to earn a PhD in rhetoric and composition or what we now call writing studies. Buck argued for an organic and society-serving view of language. As she put it, “No real writing, no real reading can be done by the student until words become to him direct and genuine expressions of thought” (“Make-Believe Grammar” 28). She articulates her society-serving view of writing in her discussion of rhetoric: “Both the Platonic and the modern theory of discourse make it not an individualistic and isolated process for the advantage of the speaker alone, but a real communication between speaker and hearer to the equal advantage of both, and thus a real function of the social organism” (“Present Status” 174). In her 1916 monograph The Social Criticism of Literature, Buck, whose thinking was heavily influenced by John Dewey’s philosophy of society, elaborated on her society-serving view of language by emphasizing the “social value” of literature and arguing against seeing literature as an “aristocratic preserve,” describing it instead as the “sincere expression of the writer’s mind” (44). For Buck, literature and composition, or reading and writing, were united by their society-serving function.
As Buck was ending her career, a scholar with related ideas was beginning hers. Rosenblatt, who embraced a society-serving and integrated view of reading and writing, offers a theoretical framework, influenced by several intellectual traditions, that addresses the divisions between literary and composition syllabi. Rosenblatt, a college roommate of Margaret Mead’s, graduated from Barnard College in 1925. Although she was tempted to join Mead in an anthropological career because of her work with Franz Boas, Rosenblatt instead chose graduate work in comparative literature, studying with Fernand Baldensperger in France and receiving a PhD from the Sorbonne in 1931. Rosenblatt returned to teach at Barnard from 1931 to 1938, and during this period her colleagues Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce also contributed to the formation of her ideas. Somewhat later, the work of I. A. Richards, another transatlantic scholar, added to Rosenblatt’s intellectual development. Thanks to my former graduate student Elizabeth Hutton, who recently completed a study of the intellectual traditions that shaped Rosenblatt’s theories, we now have a much fuller understanding of how Rosenblatt drew on and refashioned the work of her better-known colleagues. Hutton’s work makes it clear that overemphasizing the importance of Rosenblatt’s 1938 book Literature as Exploration, which has been treated alternately as the ur-text of reader-response theory or as a footnote in discussions of it, misses the real significance of this scholar’s work, because her most important publications were among her last.2
Rosenblatt had a very long career. She lived to be 101, and she continued to produce scholarly work well into her nineties. She published “The Transactional Theory of Reading and Writing” in 1994, when she was ninety-one. In this groundbreaking article, Rosenblatt defines the transactional as a process that incorporates the knower, the knowing, and the known, and she argues that reading and writing share the same process of textual transaction. In a related article she portrays “writing and reading as interrelated aspects of the individual’s transactions with the environment” (“Transactional Theory: Against Dualisms” 383). For Rosenblatt, text, person, and situation are mutually constitutive. Reading her work backward from the 1994 article illuminates how she continually developed and refined her thinking to reach the transactional theory she finally articulated. As Hutton has shown, Rosenblatt drew on Boas’s theory of cultural diffusions and the inevitability of reinterpretation; she drew on Baldensperger’s representation of the influence and reception of cultural texts; she drew on Dewey’s concept of the aesthetic; and she drew on Richards’s view of the fluid, relational, and situated nature of comprehension. Rosenblatt’s theory combines ideas from each of these thinkers to describe the transactions among persons, texts, and situations. This theory illuminates the powerful connections between reading writers and writing readers and the cultural norms and values with which they operate and negotiate.
Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and writing also focuses on language, which, as Guillory reminds us, is often overlooked in discussions of the relations between literature and composition. In her approach to language, Rosenblatt rejects Ferdinand de Saussure’s dyadic formulation of “the relation between the signifier and the signified, the word and its object” (“Viewpoints” 99) in favor of Peirce’s triadic model, which, she explains, “grounds language in the transactions of individual human beings with their world” (“Transactional Theory of Reading and Writing” 925). This means that individual purpose and potential innovation associated with language exist in constant negotiation with shifting cultural forces and norms. Peirce’s model influenced Dewey and, in turn, Rosenblatt as she argued that relationships among text, person, and situation are intertwined. As Rosenblatt puts it, “The transactional mode of thinking has perhaps been most clearly assimilated in ecology. Human activities and relationships are seen as transactions in which the individual and social elements fuse with cultural and natural elements” (“Transactional Theory of Reading and Writing” 924). Applied to language, transactional theory identifies a particular pattern of signs or texts that readers and writers activate to achieve communication and a particular context in which that meaning is understood and valued. Through the intermingling of reader and writer, text and context, each element loses its autonomy and becomes redefined by its relation to the other elements and by their modification of each other’s very nature and operation. Making meaning in both reading and writing, then, is what happens during the transactions among reader, writer, text, and context. This view of language offers a response to Guillory’s concern about the “conflict between the literary syllabus and the composition syllabus,” a conflict over what kind of writing will furnish students with the model for writing that has the greatest social capital or, in Guillory’s terms, with “the New Class sociolect” (80). Instead of signaling a struggle for the dominant model or sociolect, the relation between the literary and the writerly can be seen as mutually supportive and shaped by transactional language.
Rosenblatt’s transactional theory disrupts the literature-composition division because it highlights not the status of texts themselves but rather the dynamic positions or stances that define how people relate to texts and contexts. Language, in Rosenblatt’s terms, is a “fluid pool of potential triadic symbolizations” rather than “verbal signs linked to fixed meanings” (“Transactional Theory of Reading and Writing” 928), and all reading and writing are, at the highest level of generality, acts of linguistic rearrangement. Both readers and writers, therefore, engage in a “choosing activity” (928), and this choosing activity operates on a continuum between what Rosenblatt calls efferent and aesthetic stances. As she puts it, “The situation, the purpose, and the linguistic-experiential equipment of the reader, as well as the signs on the page, enter into the transaction and affect the extent to which public and private meanings and associations will be attended to.” The reader or writer who adopts a predominantly efferent stance focuses on “the ideas, information, directions, or conclusions to be retained, used, or acted on after the reading event” (932). Readers and writers taking this stance center their attention on language they can take up and use, which often includes conventional expressions tied to specific cultural contexts. Rosenblatt’s articulation of the efferent stance, which responds to both Richards’s discussion of stock responses and Boas’s anthropological inquiries into contexts, illuminates her attention to how readers and writers wrestle with rather than simply capitulate to cultural habits of knowing. In this view, all writers—not just student writers—do not simply take up a particular sociolect but struggle to find their own language. They structure and restructure language to fit their individual needs and purposes.
In contrast to the efferent stance, Rosenblatt’s aesthetic stance puts into conversation “not only the public referents of the verbal signs, but also the private part of readers’ and writers’ ‘iceberg of meaning:’ the sensations, images, feelings and ideas that are the residue of past psychological events involving these words and their referents” (932). The aesthetic stance requires the reader and writer to acknowledge their inherited habits and ideas while also taking a self-critical and world-critical attitude toward inherited meanings. Here Rosenblatt’s theory reflects the influence of Baldensperger’s view of the influence and reception of cultural texts, as well as Dewey’s renovation of the aesthetic. Because the aesthetic stance oscillates between self and context, it results in more purposeful and potentially revelatory questioning of texts, such as asking how an argument should unfold in an essay or what feelings and ideas are stimulated by a certain literary image or turn of phrase. Rosenblatt positions the aesthetic stance as tolerant and self-critical, as incorporating both shared cultural norms and personal experiences—qualities that describe both readers and writers.
Rosenblatt conceptualizes the reader’s and writer’s stances as dynamic, always moving on a continuum between more aesthetic and more efferent positions, not divided rigidly between a culturally bound set of rules on the one hand and an entirely expressive or free use of language on the other. From this theoretical perspective, the readerly stance cannot be separated from the writerly expression.
The intellectual legacy of Rosenblatt provides a theoretical grounding for rethinking the institutional and intellectual structures that emerged in pursuit of an outdated concept of rigor. It is time to move beyond the divisions in English studies and recognize that literary scholars’ underconceptualization of writing and composition scholars’ underconceptualization of reading have led our profession to destructive collisions. Or as Rich would put it, we have been trapped in our dichotomous language, which has generated animosities and deprecations that have weakened our departments and our intellectual authority. However, collisions have a bright side because, as quantum mechanics teaches us, they lead to entanglement. Entanglement happens when collisions between particles create pairs in which particles behave in tandem, so that affecting one particle affects the other no matter how far apart they are. When two particles are entangled, information about one improves knowledge of the other. I believe that we can use our entanglements to achieve several goals: to develop courses that better prepare all our students for the actual lives that await them; to undertake scholarship and research that explore the similarities between the readerly and the writerly; to make the holistic nature of our work more visible to the public; and to affirm that we are all, as authors and readers, engaged in what Rosenblatt calls transactional relationships with texts. We can embrace our entanglements to re-vision our language, texts, and theories in order to “see—and therefore live—afresh.”
Notes
1. Bledstein and Larson each trace the development of professionalism in the latter part of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how the newly formed middle class and societal shifts away from rigid, European-style hierarchies led to the emergence of a new form of authority in professional expertise and to the attempt to translate this expertise into social and economic rewards.
2. The 1938 edition of Literature as Exploration was published by the Progressive Education Association; the book was reissued in 1968 and 1976 by Noble and Noble and in 1995 by the MLA.
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