TEACHING READING, TEACHING WRITING: QUESTIONS OF THEORY AND PRACTICE

In spite of many recent defenses of the humanities, we are still lacking anything like an articulation of a 'logic of the humanities' comparable to what has been produced for the social sciences in various forms and at various points over the past 100 years. To articulate such a logic requires us to link practices and values - the practices being what we do in research and teaching and the values constituting the underlying beliefs and assumptions about why and how we do them. Foremost among these practices are reading and writing. Though the two are often spoken and thought together, they diverge across two fronts. For convenience sake, and without ascribing any priority to one over the other, these can be dubbed 'literal' and 'metaphorical.' Whereas the practice of reading is broadly understood as one of interpretation, the corresponding figural sense of writing (perhaps best encapsulated as ecriture) has become far less often invoked, much less deployed, in teaching. This article explores the roots and consequences of that divergence, and suggests ways in which the teaching of writing can better respond to some of the same assumptions that guide our practice of reading.