I want to bring attention to the summer 2008 MLA Newsletter [1]--hot off the press at this very moment. Gerald Graff's presidential column, "Bringing Writing in from the Cold," articulates the need for the university community to embrace, or re-embrace, the teaching of first-year writing.

He describes, in characteristic fashion, the two-tier system present on most campuses, in which faculty do everything they can to avoid teaching first-year writing (a familiar enough thing [2]), leaving it to graduate students and adjuncts. He goes on to discuss many disjunctions such a system creates: confusion about what various disciplines consider "good" writing; a disjunction between introductory and advanced level writing; and more. Ultimately Graff proposes pairing subject courses with writing-intensive courses, a thing his own university (U of Illinois) currently does.

But I want to focus on the beginnings of his argument, as it speaks to the situation of many of this blog's readers and contributors--professors and graduate students alike. Early in the column, Graff points out how the two-tier system of instruction "widens the disconnection between writing courses and the literature and other subject matter courses taught by the regular faculty."

I feel this disconnect acutely, for it corresponds to a whole set of questions--questions with low stakes in the larger scheme of things, it is true, but questions nevertheless--about the disciplinary tensions between rhetoric and literature: Should rhetoric and literature be separate, and if so how much? What's the difference between a rhetorical analysis and a literary analysis? Is rhetoric a field in the same sense that English may be construed as a field, or does rhetoric subsume all disciplines, as it sometimes claims to do? Which professors should get paid more, literature or rhetoric?

The phenomenon Graff describes, in which writing instruction and the instruction of other subjects follow the division of labor, works on the assumption that writing is only, always a skill. Graduate students and non-tenure track faculty teach (or don't teach) this skill to students en masse, and the students apply that skill to their subject-specific classes. Graff, I think, replicates that assumption in his desire to pair writing instruction courses with "real" subjects, as though writing is but a functionary for something else, something larger.

I can't say I have a claim to make here, except perhaps to wonder whether, as a self-identified literature person deeply suspicious of the totalizing gestures of Rhetoric-with-a-capital-R, I must somehow exclude writing from my purview. To do so would be, of course, totally absurd. As absurd as this: