Laughing at Wordsworth: Promoting Social Invention in the Classroom

A couple of semesters ago, I took British Writers II, a class that spent an inordinate amount of time cramming William Wordsworth down my throat.  I don’t hate Wordsworth or anything, but his general attitude about writing always struck me as downright disingenuous.  When reading his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, I choked on his description of the writing process as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity [sic]” (Prefaces).  This assertion portrays composition as less a process and more as a solitary activity in which one simply records personal insights verbatim on paper.  Couple this idea with Wordsworth’s claim that “Tintern Abbey”, with all its complexity, was written in one sitting and without revision, and you may get a bit of a complex about your own creative abilities.

"I'd better get this perfectly formed poem out of my head before it explodes."

In reality, I find the writing process to be extraordinarily messy, full of stops and starts.  I find that my ideas change during my drafting process, and in fact because I am writing.  Additionally, many aspects of my writing process are social: I spend hours talking in class about novels before I start to conceive of a paper thesis; when writing, I relate literary characters to my own social experiences; I chat with professors and my husband about what I’m working on, bouncing ideas off of them.  Perhaps this is why I scoffed at Wordsworth’s caricature of the writer as a figure who wanders off into the woods, opens up her head, and dumps its contents out.  Furthermore, perhaps this is why high school students are so intimidated when their teachers make comments like, “I want to hear your own, original ideas” as they assign individual writing assignments.

In her essay “A Platonic View of Rhetorical Invention”, Karen Burke LeFevre argues that Western societal ideals have fostered the prevalence of the unrealistic image of the inventor as a solitary and self-sufficient character. This standard bleeds into the classroom, particularly where composition pedagogy is concerned. LeFevre makes the case that creating the illusion that students are singularly responsible for producing and organizing original ideas causes harm, in that it turns students off to the task as a whole. Not to sound too glib, but, DUH.  This sort of approach teaches the student that there exists some sort of “it factor”, and if they cannot think of something groundbreaking, then they don’t have “it”.  I can scarcely think of a more intimidating academic exercise.

In addition, when a teacher employs this model, a significant portion of the learning potential becomes lost.  Writing should first and foremost be approached as a learning activity. When teachers support a pre-process writing model, which places all attention on the product of composition, students will in turn adopt the attitude that they are confronting a one-off exercise. LeFevre explains that, “In the composition classroom, we as teachers make inquiry a private matter. We give assignments to individuals and look for evidence of invention in a text that is ‘owned by’ an individual. Our students naturally enough come to assume that invention is an episode that is finished when a paper ends—when it received a grade” (12-13).  With an emphasis on singular ideas and on grades, the student is blinded to the value of the texts that they produce in the context of the texts that they are reading, and in the context of the overarching concepts of the unit and class as a whole.  They may consider the matter to be closed, and may see their ideas as fixed rather than ever-growing.

How can I combat these Western, romanticized delusions regarding the lone inventor?  How can I put my students at ease in sharing ideas, which will sharpen important literacies outside of writing a paper?  Thankfully, my mentor teacher fosters a lot of in-class discussion, and consistently encourages me to do the same.  During shared readings, we pause frequently and discuss our thoughts and feelings about the text in pairs and as a class.  We hold philosophical chairs, where students explore issues surrounding literary texts by discussing them together.  In these ways, I feel that my students are being served well.  As my students’ first essay writing assignment looms, I hope to remain hyper cognizant of their instilled apprehensions; I aim to alleviate their anxieties by remaining transparent about my own laborious and social writing process.  Someday, they’ll be laughing at Wordsworth, too.

Works Cited

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.

Prefaces and Prologues. Vol. XXXIX. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son,

1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/39/. [21 Sept. 2015].