The Teaching Archive by Rachel Sagner Buurma;Laura Heffernan; & Laura Heffernan

Author:Rachel Sagner Buurma;Laura Heffernan; & Laura Heffernan [Buurma, Rachel Sagner & Heffernan, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General, EDU015000 Education / Higher
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

English 1A: Taking Perspective

By the time Miles began teaching English 1A in 1940, freshman writing courses had been running in roughly similar format since the late nineteenth century, on several different models. Harvard began offering English A in 1885 as a pure writing course. With no outside readings, first-year students would produce short daily and long fortnightly themes on topics of their choosing. Soon after, as John Brereton describes, other schools devised their own models for the composition course. Yale and Wisconsin offered a literature-based writing course for freshman that required students to write evaluations of or reactions to poems, plays, and novels. At Indiana in the 1890s, Frank Aydelotte developed a nonfiction version of freshman composition, which involved the “close analysis of important essays, a sort of literary nonfiction course with the emphasis upon the structure of the ideas.” This model soon spread to Columbia and elsewhere. Colleges like Amherst used expository or creative writing as the basis for the freshman writing course, whereas “less prestigious colleges” focused on “grammar and mechanics drills.” As Brereton notes, the freshman composition course that “eventually prevailed was an eclectic mix” of existing approaches, featuring a blend of “personal writing, writing about literature, and writing about ideas.”38

When Miles herself took English 1B at UCLA in 1928–29, she experienced this mixed-genre approach. Miles and her classmates were required to purchase a dictionary (Webster’s Collegiate); an anthology of nonfiction essays (Warner Taylor’s Essays of the Past and Present); a short guide to summarizing and reverse-outlining such essays (Norman Foerster’s Outlines and Summaries: A Handbook for the Analysis of Expository Essays); a grammar and style guide (Edwin Wooley’s Handbook of Composition); and a composition textbook offering advice about and specimens of “exposition,” “argumentation,” “description,” and “narrative” (Henry Seidel Canby’s English Composition). The course reading also included “a novel to be selected by the instructor”; possibilities included The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Return of the Native, Pride and Prejudice, and Framley Parsonage. Finally, students were required to conduct “outside reading” in “contemporary magazines” such as the Atlantic Monthly, Century, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Scribner’s Magazine, the Yale Review, and the London Mercury.39 The class exemplifies the “eclectic” model: Miles and her classmates practiced literary interpretation, analyzed the structure of important essays, and debated contemporary ideas.

When Miles began teaching English 1A at Berkeley about ten years later, she made a singular revision to this long-standing model of the mixed-mode freshman composition course: she decided to draw her assigned readings exclusively from the contemporary world of letters. Though particular readings varied semester to semester, Miles typically used magazines such as the New Yorker, journals like the Southern Review, fiction magazines such as Story, hobbyist publications, novels (both bestsellers and “modern classics”), and general audience nonfiction like Stuart Chase’s The Proper Study of Mankind (1948). These wide-ranging readings helped Miles to represent the actually existing world of letters that she wished her students to enter as readers and writers. She often opened the first day of 1A by asking students

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