#2: Textual Power

...what texts should we teach and how should we teach them? Behind that question, of course, lurk the more properly theoretical questions of what we are trying to teach here and why we are trying to teach it. My answers to these fundamental questions can be put succinctly. The object of such study ought to be textuality: textual knowledge and textual skills. The traditional course that "introduces" students to poetry, fiction, and drama should take textuality as its object from beginning to end, emphasizing different aspects of this object as the different literary forms are studied. Poetry emphasizes language itself and the individual subject's relationship to language. Drama emphasizes the speech act, dialogue, looking, being looked at, listening, responding. And fiction emphasizes the reductive and representational powers of language, the power to give accounts, to tell stories, to turn the world into fiction and history, to narrate.

Each of these traditional forms embodies certain aspects of textual power: the power to select (and therefore to suppress), the power to shape and present certain aspects of human experience. And textual power is our ultimate subject. We have always known this, but in the past we have often been content to see this power vested in the single literary work, the verbal icon, and we have been all too ready to fall down and worship such golden calves so long as we could serve as their priests and priestesses. Now we must learn instead to help our students unlock textual power and turn it to their own uses. We must help our students come into their own powers of textualization. We must help them to see that every poem, play, and story is a text related to others, both verbal pre-texts and social sub-texts, and all manner of post-texts including their own responses, whether in speech, writing, or action. The response to a text is itself always a text. Our knowledge is itself only a dim text that brightens as we express it. This is why expression, the making of new texts by students, must play a major role in the kind of course we are discussing.

Reading and writing are complementary acts that remain unfinished until completed by their reciprocals. The last thing I do when I write a text is to read it, and the act that completes my response to a text I am reading is my written response to it. Moreover, my writing is unfinished until it is read by others as well, whose responses may become known to me, engendering new textualities. We have an endless web here, of growth, and change, and interaction, learning and forgetting, dialogue and dialectic. Our task as teachers is to introduce students to this web, to make it real and visible for them, insofar as we can, and to encourage them to cast their own strands of thought and text into this network so that they will feel its power and understand both how to use it and how to protect themselves from its abuses.

from Robert Scholes, Textual Power, Yale University Press, 1985

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Text, textual, textuality, textually, pre-text, sub-text, textualities, textualization.  (bell hooks...  bright red?) 

I get it.  The author loves this word.  But, Mercy!  (My God, did this person even read Strunk & White's Elements of Style?)

Unfortunately, his message gets lost in the over use of the word "textual" (or variants thereof.)   Deciphering what the heck he's saying educators should do took longer than I'm sure he intended.  Taking textual out of the equation, he has some good ideas.  I agree that as students in English and Writing/Composition we have to deal with many texts, and that there is a relationship between reading and writing them which deserves more attention and concentration. 

However, to have/make/do textual for textual's sake is ridiculous.  But, I'm left wondering whether he is paid by the amount of times he uses a word rooted in "text."

-n.

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2/10/2004:
Thought I'd revisit this text and re-read it now that some time has passed since my first reading.  I find that I need time to 'get over' whatever problems I have with a book/article/idea and then re-read them anew..

I still think that what the author says is valid and worthy of more incorporation into our classrooms.  However, I would like more clarification on what the author means by textual knowledge and textual skills.  I think some defining and elaborating would be beneficial for me.

-n.