You will find below an excerpt from an interview with one of the editors of the writing textbook Ways of Reading. After you read the excerpt, we’ll talk about it a little. Then I’ll give you time to answer the two questions below.
The interviewers ask David Bartholomae about something he wrote elsewhere regarding “impossible assignments” that “interfere” with students’ writing.
- What does his answer tell you about what he means by “interference”?
- How do you respond to the way of reading and writing he describes?
From Writing on the Edge 10:1 (Fall/Winter 1998/99) pp. 14-15
WOE: You also write about the need to write impossible assignments, assignments that interfere with the students’ writing.
BARTHOLOMAE:
You need to give students a productive place to begin. That’s very difficult. Say you’ve asked them to read Middlemarch, and you want them to write something; it’s the first writing assignment and you don’t even know where to begin. My shorthand for the course is that I want to point them toward something that they don’t know how to do: that’s what makes the course a course, pointing them toward some way of working with that text that they cannot imagine. To do that you really do two things: You help them to imagine what they can’t imagine, and you interfere with the habits that they already have. My students think in writing about Middlemarch they can talk about Dorothea and Casaubon as if they were real people. So if I’m going to write a sequence, I’m going to ask them to think about where and how the book seems to invite identification. I want them at some later point to get to thinking about strategies of representation in a novel like that-in particular, the way in which the narrator teaches you how and why to distance yourself rather than to simply identify with the people who are in front of you.
To get from the one place to the other, they have to do a lot of work. Some of it’s just regular: They’ve got to learn how to work with a block quotation, they’ve got to learn how to write about a novel by both working with small pieces and doing some kind of summary. But there’s also the interference part. I have to keep saying, “Remember, you’re writing about an author, a reader, and a text. Some of your sentences have to be not about Dorothea, but about a reader, or about George Eliot, a writer, or about the novel and how it’s working.” You can set the task that specifically; that is, in the subject position of your sentence, there must be some reference to either the writer or the reader. Students learn to do a certain kind of reading that then puts them in a position to imagine-which in my rhythm of teaching is usually two drafts later-that they’re no longer saying that they hate Casaubon and they also hate Will Ladislaw, but they’re thinking about how and why a novel or an author is orchestrating a set of expectations and identifications and then thwarting them or satisfying them.
That’s a long way of saying that I do think that you have to figure out in advance what you want students to do, and it should be something that they can’t imagine. It’s your job to help organize the work so it could be imaginable. That to me is organizing their work rather than telling them what to say. And one of the things you need to do along the way is interfere. It’s not that students have been badly taught; it’s just that they’re moving now to this college-level literature class and a different way of thinking about reading-or in a composition class you’re trying to get students to feel the flexibility of let’s say the essay as a genre, rather than just rely on what they take to be its fixed structure. So you’ve got to say, “Stop being so coherent, stop proving every point; search for the example that doesn’t fit, stop searching for the example that fits.” I like to teach students to write parenthetically so they get a feel for what it means to say something and to say something else simultaneously.
