“The Lindeman-Tate Debate? So what?”

Recently I have been reading a few essays that offer different perspectives on the long-standing debate in composition studies on whether or not to use literature (fiction, creative non-fiction, etc.) in the first-year writing class. The terms of the debate were laid out in the famous Lindemann-Tate debate from the 1990s carried out by them and their supporters in the pages of College English. (The original articles were published in College English in 1993. See Erica Lindemann, “Freshman Composition: No Place for Literature,” College English, 5/3: 311-316; Gary Tate, “A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition,” College English, 5/3: 317-321.)

 Lindemann argued no to the inclusion of literature from the perspective of what we would probably call Writing within the Disciplines (WID) Students need to be taught to survive in the world of the college and university, and to succeed they need to be initiated into the kinds of discourses set up by various disciplines within academe. Freshman English should ultimately be practical and give students important tools they will need for their actual course work. The reading and analysis of literature is a component of just one of these disciplines, and it should not take precedence over the others just because that field is the department from which most composition is taught. Tate, on the other hand, argued for literature in the freshman composition, saying that that he would miss considering the elements of imagination and style offered by literature, and that he worried that turning Freshman Composition into a “service course” that attempted to teach academic discourse in all its variety was not only bound to fail its mission to produce good writers, but also would fail on the more important level of teaching students to be good people, once they leave the academic world.

         The topic has continued to resurface in many guises over the past 15 years. It has an importance because it is still the case that most writing programs are housed in English departments, and there is an incredibly ambivalent relationship between composition and literary criticism, with literary criticism usually having the majority of tenure lines and having greater prestige within the university. As well, with the professionalization of the writing curriculum, many were – and are – eager to divorce the teaching of writing from the old pedagogical model in which freshman comp courses were essentially literary analysis courses. But during this time there have been several responses to the Lindemann-Tate debate by writers who advocate for a less strict division between writing and literature, and who have attempted to locate a place in the writing curriculum in which the activities involved in reading and writing about literature have a justification on a broader, pedagogical level.

         All interesting, but this has gotten me thinking about whether there is a place for literature in the music history classroom. What might the use of literature accomplish for us? Might some of these articles advocating for the use of literature as a basis for writing be useful for thinking about how we might generate writing assignments for our students? As well, I find that we need to think, as music history professors, how what we do in our classroom helps our students in other classrooms, and beyond the university, in the lives they choose to live in the future.

Over the next few blog posts, I’d like to reflect on a few of these responses to the Lindemann-Tate debate.

But what are your opinions? Do any of you use literature in you classes? How might it be used effectively?