English

ERIC ED257084: The Plural Text/The Plural Self: Roland Barthes and William Coles.

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. While theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with the way many teachers try to teach writing. The works of Roland Barthes and William Coles present theories on how to teach students to write effectively. Both men are preoccupied with the intertwining of language and the self, with the ways our sense of who we are is not only expressed by but also composed in our language. There are in the teaching of writing two common approaches to the question of style. One associates style with proper usage and trivializes it; the other equates style with integrity and sanctimonizes it. Barthes and Coles offer us a view of style based on neither correctness nor sincerity but on complexity. They show us the dialectic of writing and the self. We are what our language makes of us, and what we can make of our language. (DF)

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