The following informal essay serves as a preliminary report of my attempts to utilize cognitive science in the teaching of a literature and composition course. For the last several years, I have shaped my composition courses to incorporate my own growing understanding of the relationships between literature, language, and thought as seen through the paradigm of cognitive science. For those unfamiliar with the primary concepts behind cognitive science, it may be best understood as an interdiscipline whose subject is the mind, and whose founding assumption is that the mind is a complex biological computational device subject to and the product of the laws of natural selection (a page of definitions drawn from the literature may be found here). Naturally, the aspects of cognitive science that are most applicable to the teaching of composition and literature are those that are essentially extensions of linguistics; more details will appear later.

Without a doubt, these attempts are marked by false starts, errors in judgment, less than ideal organization, and misapplication of ideas; many of these problems (though certainly not all) could have been prevented if I had waited to implement the results of my research until my ideas had fully matured. Yet I found them so compelling, so much more right than the methods and materials I was working with, I could not help but begin implementing them piecemeal, as necessary. This process of trial-and-error, for which I thank my students for their patience and feedback (intentional and not), has served to focus my efforts and establish constraints upon practice. Ultimately, these experiments have enabled me to determine what methods and material make a meaningful difference in the classroom.

I have taught four different composition courses at the University of Connecticut:

• English 104, a "Basic Writing" course
• English 105, the first of two required freshman composition courses; selections are almost wholly non-fiction, and are usually essays in a reader such as Ways of Reading.
• English 109, a lit-comp course, and the second of two required freshman comp courses (a section of which I also currently teach)
• English 111, a 4-credit pilot lit-comp course; it is essentially a 109 with an additional credit hour allotted for group work or additional conferences.

With the exception of my first semester at UConn, I have taught literature and composition courses almost exclusively. From the very beginning, I was deeply unsatisfied with the very idea of teaching a composition course whose primary texts were to be drawn from "literature," a term that any academic working in English knows embodies and is the locus of a host of conflicts. In addition, the relationship, if any, between student writing and literature has been interrogated a great deal, with little resolved (see, for example, Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap (1983), which contains a number of landmark essays); much of the problem stems from the fact that no-one has effectively theorized how the (usually) formal study of literary texts can enhance or aid the teaching of writing. Indeed, it is inevitable that, in the contest between teaching writing and teaching literature, one side dominates a particular class, such that students in one section may grow accustomed to memorizing formalist terms, key dates, and biographical data, taking regular quizzes and exams, while students in another section learn but a handful of terms, and come away with a vague understanding that literary texts provide just one more excuse for teachers to make them write. In either case, if the students do in fact come away with improved writing and analytical skills, these skills are largely independent of any understanding of the function or place of literature in a writing course. In short, the best of these students may indeed have managed to be better writers for the course they have taken, but in spite of, or at least without credit due to, literary texts per se.

One finds complicity, even support for this divide in the prefaces and introductions of lit-comp anthologies. For example, one popular anthology, whose title, Literature and the Writing Process, would seem to promise some sort of integration between literature and writing, acknowledges in its preface that the literary selections are not presented to students as models to emulate, but as material to write about. This dichotomy is presented to the student as well:

This text serves a dual purpose: to enable you to enjoy, understand, and learn from imaginative literature; and to help you write clearly, intelligently, and correctly about what you have learned.^[1]

In short: literature is just another occasion for writing. Fundamentally, then, there is a disconnect between the teaching of writing and the texts of literature. Put more accurately, text (student) bears no relation to text (literary).^[2] It seems to me that we can do better than this, and that cognitive science provides one approach to bridging this conceptual gap.

The Experiment

My experiments really began with the first literature and composition classes I taught, two sections of UConn's English 109. Subtitled "Literature in an Information Age," the sections I taught were premised upon an information-theoretic approach to language and literature, largely derived from the work involved in the research and writing of my M.A. Thesis, "Literary Language and Complex Literature" (found here). These initial forays were fairly successful, though I severely limited the amount of theoretical material I presented, focussing only upon the issues involved in the interpretive process and the language of literature which, in this context, meant polysemy and probability/predictability. Indeed, the theoretical approach was only dominant in the very beginning of the semester, and by the time we approached the bulk of the reading, it remained only as a backdrop, rather than a living, dynamic context for our reading and writing. This was the result of two difficulties: 1) I was not certain that my approach was usable, both in the sense of "being useful" as well as being comprehensible by my students, so I was hesitant to plan an entire semester's work around it; and, 2) Although I had my theory worked out, and my texts carefully selected to support and serve as exempla for that theory, I did not have them worked out together. In short, once I explained the information-theoretic approach and worked through a few texts, the remaining texts seemed unnecessary, redundant. I failed, in general, to teach the theory through the texts; rather, I taught the theory and texts as separate (but related) entities. Part and parcel of this was the continued general disconnect (not atypical of lit-comp, as noted above) between student writing and the study of literary texts.

At that point in time, I was wholly unaware of the discipline of cognitive science. Though I was reading from authors whose works belonged to it, and utilizing theoretical approaches derived from or constitutive of it, I was not explicitly engaged in reading or doing "cognitive science." That was Spring of 1999; by the Fall of 1999 I was deeply engrossed in the cognitive science paradigm, having been given license to be so in part by Mark Turner's Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science, which I had recently encountered. Concerning my fall teaching schedule, I had volunteered for, and was selected to teach one section of a pilot lit-comp course, numbered 111, whose distinguishing feature was an additional course credit available for use by the instructor for additional group work or individual conferences. Feeling I had cut my teeth with my experiments in 109, and confident that my approach was consistent with the fundamentals of cognitive science, I subtitled my section of 111 "A Cognitive Approach to Literature and Composition," and began working out stronger relations between the texts students were asked to read and the writing they would be asked to do as well as a more thoroughly worked-out context in which to discuss and study literary texts.

A Cognitive Approach

As I have noted elsewhere, the aspects of cognitive science that most immediately impact the teaching of writing and literature are those drawn from linguistics; indeed, much of the material that shaped this first attempt to teach a cognitive science-inflected lit-comp course has been available for some time under the province of linguistics. This is, then, where I began. To offer an extremely abbreviated picture of the course: I presented material concerning the origins and acquisition of language; offered a brief glimpse at PIE in the context of language change; discussed the key universals of human language; and from there shifted into the development and acquisition of writing and, later, print. Then, having established conceptual and processing distinctions between spoken and written language, I presented poetry as an originary literary medium, and discussed its uses within oral cultures, and its transformations and evolution in a literate context. In addition, several classes were dedicated to a Lakoff & Johnson-based examination of conceptual metaphor. The remainder of the course ultimately followed a (somewhat) more traditional path, with the reading of increasingly complex texts well-suited to exploring narrative and linguistic forms increasingly deviant from conventional expectations. I do not expect that the above progression of material will be immediately apparent in its logic or goals; that subject is one that I intend to cover thoroughly in a more formal venue.

Student reactions varied; by and large, I would conclude that the course was fairly successful in imparting an alternative approach to the study of writing and literature. The evidence of this comes in two parts, naturally: the accolades and the resentments, as depicted in student reviews of the course. The accolades, as will be noted, often explicitly discuss the peculiar nature of the course, and its emphasis on language. The resentments either make the same observation, but with negative conclusions, or, more interestingly, provide negative evidence in the form of a call for the conventional approach to lit-comp instruction.

First, the positive (but disapproving) evidence:

• "This course was not much of what I expected. It focused more on the origins of language and oral vs. literate cultures."
• "I do not think my writing improved greatly, if at all with this class. Conferences were helpful but the focus of the class was not on writing or on the development of writing skills, so I feel as if it did not help me."

And the negative:

• "I don't believe this course has helped me improve my writing skills. In high school I was taught how to write analyze books and then write papers about them using solid grammar, intense vocab, thesis statement and a well thought out conclusion. I do not believe I learned how to improve my papers. I am still on the same level of writing as I was in high school."
• "I thought that our conferences were very beneficial. Lectures were boring though and not very helpful when writing our papers. We never did peer reviews, oral reports or workshops. I also don't think the books we read helped me to understand literature any better. They were so strange and I don't see how they will help me at all in the future."

So far so clear. The response I find most interesting is that of the student who listed, in order, what she regarded as the essentials for a course in composition: grammar instruction (and by this, of course, she means "grammar"), vocabulary exercises, and highly formalistic approaches to structuring essays. All four students saw no relation between the course emphasis on the nature of language, written and spoken, and the cognitive processes involved, and their own writing skills. Without exploring the actual impact upon their writing, it is safe to say that these students, like Stanley Fish et al, did not see a connection between thinking about writing and the act of writing itself. It should also be noted that a few students, including those whose comments are printed above, objected to the difficulty and nature of the readings (the literary readings, that is). How this response factors in, and to what degree it is legitimate, bears some consideration.

Now the positive responses:

• "I felt that my writing has been helped considerably as I have become more conscious of writing. When I write now, I tend to question why I write certain phrases or make specific references and this helps me to express myself more clearly. The conferences were particularly helpful as I got a chance to go over the teacher's commentary on my drafts. The lectures on language and communication also helped me to see why I write certain things and so have helped me become more critical of my work."
• "I believe this course helped my writing in some ways. The major factor this course had on me was how I now look at English itself, as a language with many variables. I also now appreciate how my outlook has changed on interpretation of the language."
• "This course made me more attentive to both the language used in texts we have read, as well as my own. This awareness has helped me to say what I mean when writing. The whole process over product concept has greatly helped me. It is a mindset that I have never considered, and am glad to have learned."
• "This course has helped my writing mature to a higher level, and is apparent in other writings for other classes as well. It has also helped me appreciate writing more. I honestly believe this course should be offered next semester + on."

While these responses fail to demonstrate a particularly technical handle upon the material of the course, they suggest that, unlike those cited earlier, these students were able to see a relationship between theorizing about language use and cognitive processes and the individual act of writing. The second-to-last comment also indicates that the usual disconnect between student writing and literary texts is, at least for this student, not palpable. This is, of course, the ideal result: that students will center their understanding of written and oral communication upon a shared point of origin, coming to understand differences in terms of their distance from universal features of speech-based languages. And, in contrast to those students critical of the course approach, several of the students just cited (as well as others) commented upon their appreciation of the "challenging" and "unusual" texts selected for reading.

Where to go from here? So far, one may argue that there is very little "true" cognitive science in the brand of lit-comp I am describing; certainly the origins of literature, the grammar-"grammar" distinction, and the oral-literate continuum are, at best, on the margins of contemporary cognitive science research. Yet I would say that the fundamental organizing principle behind a lit-comp course influenced by cognitive science, and the one to which I hold, is the idea of the mind as a computational mechanism. And if we take speech-based language as one of the primary materials processed and produced by a computing mind, we have a foundation for what may be accurately called a cognitive-science inflected composition. The typically debilitating distinction between "literature" and student writing recedes before it.