As a writer, in reading Bloom’s essay, “Textual Terror, Textual Power” I was delighted to see creative writing being brought into the literature classroom. But I have to admit, I was skeptical at how much mimicking literature would really help with interpreting the meaning of a text. Clearly, writing about literature helps with thinking about literature. (I like that Bloom calls it writing literature, as opposed to Scholes who seems convinced that by definition students cannot create literature, but instead create “practicings.” It’s a semantic thing, but one that probably makes a big difference when trying to empower students.) But Bloom’s examples of the results of this exercise seem to show more that the act of writing literature helped the students to develop a better understanding/empathy with the craft of writing (the rigor, the difficulties, the rewriting, etc.) than developing skills for finding meaning.

It was in reading Cheryl Glenn’s account (in “The Reading-Writing Connection – What’s Process Got to Do With It”) of trying to determine if students understood the difference between actual author and speaking voice in Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” that I saw an example where mimicking writing could help solve a specific interpretive issue. I can’t help but wonder if Glenn’s student Dan, who “thinks he doesn’t have to believe what he writes,” might either feel more invested or have a better understanding of what he “will not or cannot see” if he had actually attempted to write a satire. Would writing a satire enable him to see the text from the inside-out rather than from behind a wall that neither he nor his teacher is able to penetrate by simply discussing and writing about the text? In this particular case, mimicking the form of the satire seems a more powerful tool than rewriting from an alternate perspective (an activity both Robert Scholes and Brenda Greene suggest). However, rewriting from another perspective could certainly be used, as Green says, to analyze and evaluate how the author has used the elements of the texts to heighten conflicts and develop themes.

I find Glenn’s journaling account of her classroom model of reading, writing, and thinking to be very compelling. As Scholes pointed out, “what (students) need from us now is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests, both individual and collective, to see through the manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their views in some appropriate manner” (15-16). Merely spewing facts about a piece of literature on an exam does little to help students learn to interpret their world, and so it follows teaching these facts also does little achieve our real goals. Discussion is excellent, but I think writing has a greater power, both in terms of helping students develop their thoughts and in helping them remember the knowledge and the skills they have learned. As Francois pointed out a couple weeks ago, it is the journey not the destination.