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On Tue, 22 Apr 1997, Keston Sutherland wrote: > "making it new" seems of a quite lapsed importance - - seems to me to be a phrase capable of being re-invented more or less indefinately ... 'writing an > essay' is not an adventure involved in some kind of communal literary > prescience, and shouldn't be directed by that commitment or its > conscripts; - well, like cris says, it's all writing, and the folks who approach one aspect of this sloppily are unlikely to make much headway with another. Maybe you can't directly teach/prepare for the adventure at the same time as you teach the routine bits, tho I think they're not as separate as you suggest. But maybe too you should be prepared to infuse a bit of each into the other... wouldn't the reading lesson you propose be designed to make > abstruse modern texts seem familiar, when it has been a (tacit) defining > principle of those texts to defamiliarize themselves? Leaving them (the > texts) to languish un(der)noticed by all other than their few enthusiasts > (whose presence in HE institutions you account for) seems really quite > normal, - well, reading simply to decode (which wasn't what I was advocating) might make such a process, and it wouldn't go very far. I think I hoped for a process which delivered surprise (as it did to my Czech students) but could never propose familiarity. That's where you use "old" writing, hopefully, to suggest new possibilities. unless it becomes imperative that the language of the age > officially include the language of these poetries, which implies, I think, > a poisonous recriprocality. Perhaps. - Pretty poisonous, to be sure - and dangerously close to the intent of various government thought on "the teaching of literature". However - as an alternative to Major/Blairism as linguistic authority, I'll go for Bunting, Niedecker, Clare, Langland, practically anyone... Not that language is ever built of straight alternatives. Spare a moment for a plural process in the speech elections: proportional linguistic representation, qualified majority speechforms ... on second thoughts I'm not voting in that election either. Where does this leave the educator in Allen's original post? best, Ric %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%