Jarratt/Bartholomae/Bernstein - A comparison

One of the great things about being an English Literature major is that I keep meeting old friends through the process of reading. Discovering that through the inundation of required reading the very practice of it produces memory jogs of perhaps what may have been forgotten souls. As I read through Jarratt’s essay “Rhetoric” I kept asking myself “where have I seen this before?” and I attempted to connect-the-dots so to speak. On page 74 Jarratt discusses public vs. private discourse as intimate and isolated settings, which is very reminiscent of Habermas’s account of the bourgeois debating public ideas in private settings such as the coffee houses. Later in the essay Jarratt cites Habermas, but I found it interesting that by having some foreknowledge of the authors helped me to understand the essay more fully. Throughout Jarratt’s essay a student of literature can readily identify the authors, theorists, poets that are referred to. However, when I read through the essay by Bartholomae I felt as though it were a manifesto of some sort -- a series of lists and recommendations (like something we might see in The Oxford Guide to Library Research) -- the essay did not fully engage me as a reader. On the other hand, I did find that Bernstein’s essay on “Poetics” (although filled with lists as well) did offer insightful information on poetry as a process and a freedom from having to absorb the rules of writing. Bernstein creates more of an Aristotelian way of thinking by allowing the poets to creatively write rather than deal with the minutia of extrapolation. Plato would be appalled by the reverence given to the poet.