I just finished reading the Salvatori chapter this morning before coming to campus and I was glad to read Leta's blog, because I had a similar reaction to the essay.
Either I'm not reading well (or reading argumentatively?) or I just don't know enough about composition as a discipline, but I just couldn't get ahold of the essay. I was compelled by the idea that reading is a critical step in the process of learning to write, but I felt like the essay didn't make me understand what she was talking about. If, as she says on page 349, "The argument is about which kind of reading gets to be theorized and practiced," then what kind of reading, specifically, is she advocating? I felt like I needed a lot more concrete examples than Salvatori was offering, and I needed to be walked through more scenarios that explored her teaching approaches.
I did appreciate the section on page 353 where she describes the discussion surrounding the marks students made in their text; that helped me get an idea of how she envisioned this approach in the classroom. I also appreciated her statement on page 356: "My aim is to point out that these notions of reading may lead to approaches to teaching that are potentially elitest and exclusionary." She's refering to English graduate students description of reading (which almost reads like a conversion narrative), and I really agree that we can't be too aware of the potential distance between our own point of view and the points of view of our students.
However, I found Salvatori's comments about the reactions of "creative writing" and "culture studies" students/instructors odd. Salvatori seems to try to be open-minded and considerate of other points of view, but I feel like she's being rather condescending toward culture studies, specifically. She says, "What is so disturbing and uncomfortable about critical reflexivity?"(357) but I wonder, "What does she find so disturbing and uncomfortable about a critique of her theories and methods?" Folklore (my area of interest) is not culture studies (and for an in-depth discussion of this see me outside of class) but has some things in common with culture studies. I think that present-day folklore scholarship is almost excruciatingly self-reflexive and self-critical, and I wonder what, specifically, prompted Salvatori's (almost) diatribe?
How I might use her methods in Eng 1K assignments I will save for another blog.
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While I reacted a bit more favorably to Salvatori's overall argument, I felt much like you did when I read her section on 'creative writing' folks. I can't imagine why she would choose to label the mystical, magical reader types as 'creative writers', because I feel that creative writing programs are a synthesis of the two approaches to reading. In my poetry workshops, we have discussed and vacillated between both kinds of reading, the critical and the 'magical'. We recognize that there are moments when reading a poem that do seem, in fact, magical and beyond analysis. However, we also spend much of our time critiquing each other’s poems to discover what portions of the writing work well and what falls flat when reading the poem itself.
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