I can’t resist beginning my response to the Tompkins interview with a reflection on the significance of the times our paths have crossed. The interview itself and Jane’s open and warm demeanor seem to welcome this approach.

Personal Encounters

My first encounter was in the form of an appreciative letter from her after a mutual friend, Frank Hubbard, had sent her a copy of a paper I had delivered, “Women as Reader-Response Critics,” at the Midwest Modern Language Association Convention in 1982. In the paper I argued that the approaches to reader response of Tompkins, Susan Suleiman, and Louise Rosenblatt were gendered in interesting and important ways. Jane clearly liked the piece. I then sent her a draft of “Gender and Reading,” an essay she was less comfortable with since it seemed to assume that there was a single correct reading of the three short stories under consideration and to judge student responses in accordance with how well they conformed to this single inter­pretation. Thanks to comments by Jane and others, the revised version of “Gender and Reading” is considerably less rigid in its insistence on the one true meaning of a text. Jane’s reaction to the essay suggested to me at the time that her theoretical stance was (and no doubt still is) considerably closer to a poststructuralist perspective than is mine.

There was much more at stake in my next encounter, for she was the referee that Johns Hopkins University Press selected to review Gender and Reading. She was enthusiastic about the manuscript but not about the introduction to the book and a few of the contributions, including avery early draft of mine. I substituted “Gender and Reading” for the premature piece, Patsy Schweickart and I decided to drop two or three others, and we revised the introduction.

In the summer of 1985, between the acceptance of Gender and Reading and its publication, I had the good fortune of having lunch with Jane at the School of Criticism and Theory. Jwas in Evanston for the weekend so a friend who was attending the School, Ellen Messer-Davidow, made the arrange­ments. Sensational Designs had just been published, and Jane talked about her writing group, about the difficulties she had had writing the book, about her vulnerabilities as a writer, and about the discomfort she had felt in the job interview for the position at Duke (for she had not yet joined the faculty there). I remember thinking at the time that a collection of essays about the writing processes of women like Tompkins would be wonderful.

Our paths crossed once again during the winter of 1991 when she and Andrea Lunsford participated in a session on feminist pedagogy that I had organized for the MLA Division on the Teaching of Literature. Coordinating the session necessitated several phone calls early in 1991 which became long and intense because they occurred while I was engaged in one of my many struggles with my university’s bureaucracy. I felt quite comfortable sharing the details of my situation, and the support Jane provided was much-needed. Having read the Tompkins interview, I now realize why Jane was so helpful. She feels that departments need to provide “maternal” attention to its members, providing them the encouragement they deserve and nurturing a spirit of collectivity, a “commitment not simply to finding the latest truth in your subfield but to the people you work with in your department and to the institution as an alma mater for the students who are coming through.” She sees that “a much more local focus for people’s energies, drives and ambitions than a focus on becoming nationally known for this or that discovery or contribution—might help to defuse and make less tempting or desirable that kind of combat and grasping after visibility that seems to characterize the profession so much of late. The culture of the institution is what needs to change.”

The MLA session itself, which coincided with the publication of Jane’s second book, West of Everything, was very well attended, and a number of people told me afterward that it was the best session of the conference. I had asked Jane and Andrea to speak for only fifteen minutes and then to allow the members of the audience to respond to their presentations. Andrea spoke of obstacles placed in the way of pedagogies that encourage collaboration at her own university and elsewhere. Jane spoke of a course she was then teaching at Duke that aimed to break free of the boundaries of the traditional classroom. Students conversed about what was happening in their lives as much if not more than what was happening in the texts they were reading, made field trips to places such as the local Toys R Us store, and were invited to dinner at Tompkins’ house where they received gifts from her.

The excitement of the pedagogical approaches described and validated in combination, perhaps, with the unusual structure of the session produced a lively conversation and a temporary but powerful feeling of shared commu­nity. By the end, participants were exchanging addresses and calling for a continuation of the session at the next year’s MLA. (Judith Fetterley and I conducted a workshop on feminist pedagogy at the 1992 MLA.)

Opportunities for Dialogue

Forums such as the MLA session and the Tompkins interview provide excellent opportunities for dialogue between literature specialists and com­position specialists and for a recognition that the two communities have different but complementary areas of expertise that can be mutually benefi­cial. They will never satisfactorily engage each other, though, until they are seen as equal, and we are far from achieving this goal. As Susan Miller points out in Textual Carnivals, composition has been regarded as a practical, “how-to” field without intellectual rigor. Its domain is the realm of immature student writing in contrast to literature’s domain of quasi-religious textual ideals. According to Miller, compositionists respond to their institutional status in ways that closely parallel responses by other groups marginalized by class, race, or gender.

Tompkins’ appreciative stance toward the field of composition studies represents to me a hope that the lit/comp binary, with its inevitable privileg­ing of literature over composition (or theory/practice over teaching) can be deconstructed. Tompkins, after all, is a professor in one of the premiere literature departments in the country and is married to one of the foremost literary theorists in the nation. If she has discovered that compositionists are far ahead of literature specialists in the area of pedagogy, and if she recog­nizes the value of pedagogical work, then there is a possibility that others trained in literature will as well.

The Tompkins interview reminds me of the JAC interview with Mary Belenky, in that both scholars revealed an interest in and respect for the field of composition studies. It is not surprising that Tompkins speaks appreciatively of the chapter “Connected Teaching” in Women’s Ways of Knowing. I learned in preparing for the 1991 MLA session that Jane has been becoming increasingly interested in pedagogy recently, is writing a book on the subject, and is discovering that exciting pedagogical exploration and experimentation is going on within composition studies. As she says in the interview, “The most interesting thinking and ideas in higher education about class­room teaching come from the field of rhetoric and composition.” I learned, too, that she has been conducting pedagogy workshops with compositionists such as Bill Coles of the University of Pittsburgh. She was delighted to be paired with Lunsford, a well-known compositionist, at the MLA session.

The interview suggests, though, that the gap between faculty whose primary allegiance has been to literary studies and faculty whose primary allegiance has been to composition studies is often considerable. The former tend to see themselves as writers, as producers of scholarly essays that are well-crafted, intellectually sophisticated, and well-researched. The field of literary studies privileges scholarship over teaching. Students of literature are trained to write books and articles on literary topics, be they theoretical or critical. They learn to produce sophisticated prose and sustained argu­ments. The writing in journals such as PMLA is unquestionably mature, authoritative. Jane’s development as a powerful writer, although recent, is characteristic of people with her background, training, and situation: a Yale Ph.D. in literature and a position in one of the strongest literature depart­ments in the country.

Compositionists, in contrast, are generally not from ivy league universi­ties and are generally more committed to pedagogical innovation than to the production of scholarly writing. It is only recently, after all, that compositionists have begun to produce book-length studies, and, until recently, much of the writing that has been done in composition studies has more closely resembled reportorial writing done in the social sciences than the stylized essays produced within literary studies. For the most part, compositionists are far ahead of literature specialists in the area of pedagogy but have not had the opportunities to develop as writers that literature specialists have had because they have been burdened by heavy teaching loads and labor-intensive administrative responsibilities.

Pedagogy and Disciplinary Expectations

Although Jane recognizes the need for innovative approaches to the teaching of literature and appreciates the work of compositionists, she is clearly considerably more comfortable in the role of writer than she is in the role of teacher. She is an accomplished writer, an excellent stylist, and a careful researcher. Her work has been well received. As she mentions in the interview, West of Everything was selected by Oxford University Press for nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Although it is only recently that she has begun to think of herself as a writer (there were long stretches in her career, apparently, when she did not write), she is obviously entirely comfortable with the role and extremely productive and prolific. She describes writing in positive terms. She says, “It’s a great pleasure to think that I can think of myself as a writer.” She is “absolutely delighted” that she has made the crossover from critic to writer. Writing for her is “a mode of self-refinement and self-development which is an end in itself.” Writing is a kind of grooming activity, a way that people have of taking care of themselves. She participates enthusiastically in a writing group. She speaks of having gained self-confidence as a result of writing and finds that one’s writing process is very much a function of one’s psychological, technological, and other circum­stances.

Jane sees parallels between the changes that have taken place in her writing and in her teaching. Just as she has moved from writing as a kind of ego activity to writing as a form of self expression, she has moved from a belief in the “performance model” of teaching to a student-centered classroom. Clearly, though, she feels considerable discomfort in her role as innovative teacher. She speaks of the “precariousness~~ of her recent experiments with alternatives to traditional pedagogical approaches. As a result of her innovations, her classroom has ceased to be a “safe” place for her. She admits that when it comes to pedagogical matters, her views are those of a person “who isn’t particularly well informed.” She speaks of a feminist theory course that became a “pretty traumatic experience.” For her, making changes in her traditional pedagogical methods is “difficult.” She describes an experimen­tal undergraduate course as another traumatic course. She says, “There was a lot of fear involved for me. Every single day for about seven weeks (and that’s a long time) my heart was in my throat when I walked into that class because I did not know what was going to happen, whether it was going to be a good or bad day, whether the experiment was working or not.” The class produced a “constant vertigo.”

Perhaps sensing that Tompkins is vulnerable when it comes to discussing pedagogy, many compositionists and feminists have been critical of her work in this area. A compositionist friend who attended the MLA session said she found Tompkins’ discussion of what she was doing in her classroom to be embarrassingly undertheorized. A feminist friend had a similar response and observed that only at an elitist institution could faculty risk spending a class session at Toys R Us. I was a panelist at a conference several years ago in which a compositionist spent thirty minutes critiquing Tompkins’ work in a rather unfriendly way. I had dinner with some colleagues recently at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English who ex­pressed the sentiment that in attending to pedagogical matters, Tompkins is colonizing territory that should remain the province of compositionists. They felt, too, that her gestures of appreciation for work in composition ring false because they do not seem to coincide with participation in the compo­sition community by attending composition conferences or reading the work of compositionists. The reaction is a kind of reversal of the usual situation in which the literature specialist is disdainful of the theoretical naivete or immature scholarship of the composition specialist. Tompkins’ entry into the conversation about how best to create student-centered classrooms has clearly angered a number of compositionists.

My own reaction has been somewhat different. I welcome Jane’s entry into the conversation and appreciate her candor in admitting that her experiments have been distressing as well as her recognition that in this area compositionists are considerably more knowledgeable than she is. I see the gestures she is making toward the composition community as sincere and valuable ones that should be emulated by her colleagues in literature-dominated departments of English. She is taking an important first step that may encourage others to follow.

At the same time, I see Tompkins’ recent discovery of student-centered pedagogies to be a sad commentary on the inattention paid to pedagogical concerns by the literature community. I remember my first reaction to “Pedagogy of the Distressed” very vividly. The essay brought home to me the extent to which the reader-response movement within the field of literary studies has enabled theoretical and critical work but not pedagogical work. I realized that despite the fact that Tompkins had edited Reader-Response Criticism and had been at the center of the response movement for a time, her work in the area had had little or no impact on her teaching. I realized, too, that this was probably the case for many other reader-response theorists and practitioners in literary studies and that individuals such as Louise Rosenblatt and David Bleich who were primarily interested in teaching were in some ways anomalous. Rosenblatt’s field is primarily education rather than literary studies, and David Bleich has become a compositionist. Only recently has Tompkins discovered that reader-response criticism provides a way to “put students at the center of the study of literature.” She now sees it as making a similar contribution to feminist criticism in that it legitimizes a certain kind of personal response to literature and so has “a kind of integrative effect or performed a unifying function in terms of making a connection between peoples’ lives and what went on inside classrooms in colleges and universities.”

The fields of literary studies and composition studies have developed in very different ways in the past few decades. Literary studies has become a field that values interdisciplinarity and that has considerable theoretical sophistication. It has expanded its concerns from explications of individual literary texts, defined narrowly to include traditional literary genres, to considerations of the nature of textuality itself and to an exploration of relationships between texts and culture defined broadly. What it has not done, though, is to focus attention on what it means to teach literature and how this might best be done given that student populations are increasingly diverse. Tompkins’ interview and her work on pedagogy suggest that this may be changing. Literature specialists may be discovering that as their work turns in the direction of cultural studies, and as they become increasingly aware of the importance of the reader in the literary transaction, they cannot ignore the political implications of their pedagogical practices. If attention to pedagogical concerns becomes widespread within literary studies, then there is a possibility that the differences between the fields of literary studies and composition studies will be reduced, as will the differences in the relative status each is accorded within English studies. I see Jane Tompkins not as a colonizer but as a potential equalizer. As she is well aware, we have knowledge and know-how that can help mitigate her distress.