Introduction

In the final months of 2009, the WPA listserv (WPA-L) saw an onslaught of detailed responses to an initial post with the deceptively simple subject line: "How well do your students read ...?" The complete question, posted in the body of the email, sent to the listerv on October 27 by Bob Schwegler (2009) from the University of Rhode Island read: "How well do your students read complex texts — other than literary texts?" With more than fifty responses in just a few days, it became clear that this was an issue that interested a range of subscribers, many of whom responded to the question by drawing on their classroom teaching practices. Some listed useful assignments and methods (e.g., rhetorical analyses, annotation) while others wrote about textbooks that encourage the teaching of reading in composition such as Bartholomae and Petrosky's Ways of Reading and Rosenwasser and Stephen's Writing Analytically.

The majority of the respondents, however, went outside of composition to think about reading. Some encouraged those in composition to turn to the Education Departments at their schools. Others such as Jennifer Wells (2009) shared websites for high school English teachers and names of speakers and other scholars (e.g., Frank Smith) working within K — 12 whose work might be adapted for use by post-secondary instructors. Arguing, on the other hand, that literature instructors are especially well-equipped to teach reading, Ryan Skinnell (2009) looked to the New Critics as exemplars of literature instructors committed to the teaching of reading, which he defines as "comprehension, close reading, critical assessment. I will not, can not, shall not claim that literature specialists are the best reading teachers in the world," writes Skinnell, "But I will, can, and shall claim that they are expert readers with the potential for teaching reading as a valuable function of what English departments claim to do." Overall, the posts are best characterized by Patricia Donahue's (2009) post wherein she writes: "It is curious to me that when the subject of reading comes up those of us in rhetoric/composition veer in one of two directions: towards literature, saying that's what those people teach; or towards developmental reading specialists, trained in more qualitative methods. But we don't refer to the substantial body of work done on reading in our own field (especially in the late eighties to early nineties) — particularly on the interrelationship of reading and writing. Why not?" Interestingly, although subscribers continued to respond to this thread for days after Donahue posted her provocative question, no one addressed or answered it except Bill Thelin (2009b) who suggested "an online study/reading group to discuss the research Patricia talks about" in order to "help us implement it and perhaps contribute to the body of knowledge by creating new applications."

WPA-L subscribers are not the only ones in the field for whom the 1980s and 1990s is not a reference point for scholarship on reading. Histories of the field such as Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition do not include a discussion of those scholars within composition for whom reading pedagogy was as important as writing pedagogy. More recently, Susan Miller's 1,760-page The Norton Book of Composition Studies and Villanueva and Arola's (2011) 899-page Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, two anthologies that are often used in graduate courses in rhetoric and composition, neglect to include essays on reading despite the overwhelming presence of these in the field during the 1980s and 1990s. This moment wherein attention to reading flourished within composition is simply not a part of standard accounts of composition's history. Neither is it represented in texts used to educate scholars new to the field. Why didn't the subject of reading become integral to how composition defined itself as a field since compositionists were studying reading and developing reading pedagogies at this disciplinary-defining moment? Over the years, hypotheses have been offered as to why reading did not establish itself as one of the field's primary subjects. The first holds the "great divorce" (also called the "great divide") responsible, noting that as composition worked hard to define itself against literary studies in the 1980s it held especially tight to writing instruction since that was the one element that separated these fields from each other. Related to this first hypothesis is the theory that a struggle over disciplinary identity may have been the cause, a struggle that was marked by composition's investment in separating itself not only from literary theory, but also from reading instruction as it was defined by education (particularly K — 12). Another hypothesis is that reading as a subject of inquiry has not disappeared, but that the term "reading" has been subsumed by the broader term "literacy" in much the same way Paul Butler found that attention to style never disappeared from composition, but simply migrated to other areas within composition, including genre studies among others. A final hypothesis has to do with the "social turn," wherein the field's attention turned toward writing's social dimensions and situated the writer as a social being affected by cultural, political, and social forces. While these are viable hypotheses, I am not convinced that they tell the entire story.

Each of these hypotheses looks outside of what I will call "the reading movement" in order to account for reading's inability to take hold in the field. And, while Chapter 4 details the aspects of the discussions from the 1980s and early 1990s that are worth recovering, this book also contends that one contributing factor may actually lie within the scholarship from that movement. This project recovers that scholarship to explore precisely how scholars articulated their theories of reading and how the conflation of the terms "reading" and "literature," as well as differing goals of the scholars, were obstacles that prevented reading from securing its place as a primary focus of the field. These dissonances reigned, and as Kathleen McCormick (1994, 5) points out, in the "absence of such dialogue, work in reading remains fragmented and its transformative capacities limited."

Looking closely at the proliferation of scholarship on reading from the 1980s and 1990s both to imagine what went wrong, as well as to describe what seems recoverable and useful from that moment, this book considers what might be involved in reanimating discussions about reading within composition. Studying this moment provides access to how it was that these scholars managed to redefine reading instruction as something other than remedial and expand the intellectual and pedagogical sphere of rhetoric and composition — even for just a short period — to include theories and pedagogies of reading.

As I make the final edits on this introductory chapter, initially drafted a few years ago, I am excited to point out that we may again be entering a period like the 1980s and 1990s wherein compositionists are starting to (re)turn to questions surrounding the teaching of reading in composition. As Salvatori and Donahue (2012) note in their most recent College English piece, "Stories about Reading: Appearance, Disappearance, Morphing, and Revival," there seems to be a revival of interest in reading in the field of composition. I imagine this book contributing to this revival by offering an account of reading's demise, some historical antecedents that may help explain it, as well as some recommendations for reintroducing discussions of reading. Taking into consideration how and why, historically, reading has been neglected by composition and pairing that history with a current, qualitative study of the place of reading in contemporary first-year composition classrooms (Chapter 2) allows me to make recommendations for effectively reanimating discussions of reading in composition and productively integrating attention to reading into first-year composition classrooms.

Reading and Writing: Counterparts in the Construction of Meaning

The term "reading" throughout this book is not simply referring to the scanning of words on a page. Although the term "composition" has, for years, been used synonymously with the term "writing" in curricula and scholarship, this study — like the scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s — is founded on the idea that both practices of reading and writing involve the construction — or composition — of meaning. In defining reading as an active enterprise, this study follows the lead of Ann E. Berthoff, David Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky, Alice Horning, Mariolina Salvatori, Patricia Donahue, Donna Qualley, Linda Flower, and James R. Squire, among others, whose scholarship and teaching locate reading and writing as forms of inquiry and ways of making meaning. Berthoff (1982) has argued that "at the heart of both reading and writing is interpretation, which is a matter of seeing what goes with what, how this goes with that. Interpretation," she writes, "has survival value. We and all of our fellow creatures must interpret in order to stay alive. The difference between them and us is language: It is language that enables us to go beyond interpreting to interpret our interpretations. This spiraling circularity empowers all the activities of mind involved in meaning making" (85). Squire (1983, 581) sees reading and writing as two operations that "actively engag[e] the learner in constructing meaning, in developing ideas, in relating ideas, in expressing ideas." Bartholomae and Petrosky (1986, 14) locate reading as an activity that "centers itself on a general inquiry into the possible relations between a reader and a text, something that can be represented by studying the specific written responses of specific readers." In "From Story to Essay: Reading and Writing," Petrosky (1982, 20) describes reading in terms of understanding: "Reading, responding, and composing are aspects of understanding, and theories that attempt to account for them outside of their interactions with each other run the serious risk of building reductive models of human understanding." Qualley's (1997) "essayistic reading" also assumes that reading is a form of inquiry that is transactional in nature, but she argues that her approach has a wider application in that it may be used by students and teachers alike and offers a "both/and" stance that she believes is lacking in Bartholomae and Petrosky's method. A "form of hermeneutic inquiry into texts," Qualley's approach "is not a way of reading (or writing) that many students have experienced. ... In essayistic reading and writing, readers and writers put themselves at risk by opening themselves to multiple and contrasting perspectives of others. At the same time, however, they reflexively monitor their own beliefs and reactions to the process," since "readers need to be both the subject and object of their reading (they read themselves as they read the text)." This "ensures that their encounter with ideas will be dialogic and bidirectional rather than unidirectional" (62).

None of these scholars defines reading and writing as mechanical or instrumental processes. Instead, they highlight the hermeneutical nature of reading and writing (some, drawing directly from Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Georg Gadamer) and how these practices can be used to foster understanding and self-reflexivity. Adopting this formulation, this study also posits that reading is a deliberate intellectual practice that helps us make sense of — interpret — that which surrounds us. And, that which surrounds us includes so much more than published texts. We also read our own writing, our own and others' belief systems, as well as everything from ideological and social structures to political and advertising campaigns to each other's expressions and our personal interactions. The range of activities that falls under what might be called "reading" demands a more complex practice than a one-size-fits-all mechanical process of decoding. The emphasis that the scholars writing in the 1980s and 1990s place on self-reflexivity and (meta)cognition acknowledges the complexity of reading and its many manifestations, and, thus, becomes crucial to my recommendations for renewing discussions about reading in composition.

Reading in Composition: The Last Two Decades

Prior to a 2012 change in the Conference on College Composition and Communication's (CCCC) call for proposals, it had been almost two decades since composition's professional organization encouraged panels and presentations on reading. Salvatori and Donahue (2012, 210) found that although in the 1980s several subject clusters on the CCCC's call for proposals invited panels and presentations about reading or reading-writing connections, more recently and for roughly "seventeen years the word 'reading' was completely invisible." Others have conducted similar studies: David Jolliffe (2003, 128) notes that the word "reading" only appeared in the titles of two sessions at the 2003 CCCC's meeting where there were 574 concurrent sessions, special interest groups, and workshops. Moreover, Debrah Huffman (2007, 5) found that "combined, the number of sessions and individual presentations devoted to either reading or analytical reading comprises scarcely one percent of the total presentations in any given year."

Certainly, tracing the presence of the word "reading" in the CCCC's call for proposals does not outright prove anything. But, these studies suggest, along with the range of other evidence I offer in this introductory chapter and beyond, that reading has seemingly disappeared from composition's disciplinary landscape. It is worth noting that Salvatori and Donahue (2012) offer an alternate hypothesis — namely that reading is omnipresent in composition, "suffusing" all that we do in the discipline, and is thus taken for granted and unexplored. Despite our differing perspectives, though, our conclusions remain the same: To neglect reading altogether (my position) or "reduce reading to a kind of pervasive background influence and to push it to the borderlines" (211) is problematic because composition loses the opportunity to increase its knowledge about writing's counterpart in the construction of meaning and to imagine the implications of this knowledge for the teaching of writing.

For the most part, discussions of reading as it relates to composition focus on which texts one should teach in the composition classroom (if any at all) rather than the practice of reading itself. In other words, composition scholars spend time focusing on reading(s) as a noun — rather than on reading as a verb, as a practice or process. For example, in what has come to be called the Lindemann-Tate debate, compositionists Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate discussed the role of literature in first-year composition courses. In the pages of College English,Lindemann (1993) details her position that literature should not be taught in first-year composition because literary texts don't adequately represent the type of writing students will be expected to complete in the academy. Still, she notes that the course should pay attention to reading. In fact, she insists that paying attention to reading is an integral part of first-year composition, noting that "we need to join students in exploring these sites of composing" (316). Tate and others who entered the discussion, however, conflated the teaching of reading with the teaching of literature without recognizing the distinction upon which Lindemann's argument depends. Tate (1993), for example, focuses exclusively on text selection noting that "we should not deny our students the pleasure and profit of reading literature" (319) since this "excellent writing" helps students improve as writers, a point he does not develop except to say that his vision "excludes no texts" (321) in the composition classroom.

More recently, in Profession 2009, which focuses on "The Way We Teach Now," many scholars address the status of reading within English studies. While David Steiner's (2009) "Reading" and Mark Edmundson's (2009) "Against Readings" take the usual approach to discussing reading as a noun rather than a verb, Gerald Graff (2009) approaches the issue differently, contending that it matters more how we read than what we read in "Why How We Read Trumps What We Read." Still, this focus on the very process of reading compels him to explore an implication of his argument that ultimately has more to do with the substance of the readings (noun) rather than the process the title suggests he may pursue. He admits that his argument may seem to lead to the following "untenable conclusion": "If how we read trumps what we read, if any text can be made hard by the way students are asked to read and talk about it, then it would seem to follow logically that it makes no difference which texts a teacher assigns. A syllabus consisting entirely of texts on the Vanna Speaks level (or of nothing but comic books or VCR programming manuals) could presumably be as intellectually challenging and possess as much educational value as a syllabus consisting of established classics" (72). The remainder of Graff's essay explores this implication until he arrives at the conclusion that "the kinds of texts we assign do matter" (73), thereby shifting his focus from the process of reading to what types of readings to teach.