An Example of What I'm Talking About

Bruce Catton has long been recognized as one of our greatest Civil War historians and one of the most elegant and eloquent writers to address that monumental subject -- the Homer of our national Iliad, if you will. Here's a passage about the battle of Gettysburg from This Hallowed Ground:

"It was the queer fate of the men who fought over the great question of Union that this most desperate and spectacular of all their battles should not be entirely comprehensible until after all of the dead had been buried, the wounded tended, the field itself made into a park, and the armies gone far below the horizon, fighting other battles in other places. Then the President would come and speak a few sentences, and the deep meaning of the fight would at last begin to clear. Then the perplexing mists and shadows would fade and Gettysburg would reveal itself as a great height from which men could glimpse a vista extending far into the undiscovered future."

All he's really saying here is that Gettysburg would come to symbolize the entire war for many, that it changed everything, that it was, to put it in the terms we all got from our sixth-grade history teachers, the turning-point of the war. Of course he's also saying much more than that -- that the battle would come to be seen as the defining event of the war, just as the war itself was the defining event of nineteenth-century American history. In both cases, nothing could ever be the same again.

Now, I have actually assigned chapters from Catton's book in first-year composition classes (including the chapter on Gettysburg), and what I'm most struck by is the extent to which virtually ALL of my students recognize this as great writing, and, in fact, a clear example of great autonomous authorship. They get that WHAT he's saying isn't particularly new (nor was in 1955 when the book was first published), but that HOW he says it is uniquely his. The individual expression of common ideas here is what matters to them. They also get that "patchwriting" something out of this passage would not somehow make it less Catton's or more theirs.

Seems to me they have a clearer understanding of authorship than Howard and her cohorts are willing to admit.