A conversation between Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
Double entry
I recently asked my students to engage in a “dialectical journal” activity in our William Carlos Williams class. There are many examples online of what teachers refer to as a “dialectical” or “double entry journal,” in which students use multiple columns on a page to react to specific phrases and passages from a text. The dialectical journal is a popular tool in secondary schools and undergraduate curricula, and ranges from the relatively simple act of gathering reactions to a text to more complex methods of translating reactions into critical assessment and reflection — visual connections, social questions, naming literary techniques, generating a thesis. Essentially, the dialectical journal is a physical template for the kinds of annotating and close reading we do all the time: a kind of spreadsheet to track what different parts of the text are doing, and what kinds of reactions we have to them. What I found in the Williams class, however, is that there is something even more dialogic going on than creating a conversation between readers: the genre of the text seems in some ways to determine the form of the reader’s own writing.