In 1979, the poet, scholar, and critic John Hollander took over the long-standing Daily Themes course at Yale, which before him had been taught, among others, by the celebrated novelist and essayist John Hersey. Daily Themes is a course in writing that dates back to 1907, when it was founded by the rhetorician Charles Sears Baldwin, who described it as ‘a course in personal expression, aiming at fluency in focusing daily impressions.’ The references to ‘personal expression’ and ‘daily impressions’ suggest that even a professor of rhetoric such as Baldwin taught writing in a manner shaped by the empiricism of the time. But when Hollander took the course over, he transformed it by drawing on the models of Renaissance pedagogy on which he was expert – and which are in fact implicit in the title, since the ‘theme’ was a staple of Renaissance pedagogy. Towards the end of his life, he and his student Professor Kenneth Gross began conceptualising a book based on Hollander’s approach to Daily Themes. They were not able to see the project to completion before Hollander’s death, but in the rest of this overview we draw gratefully on their book proposal. We would like to thank for permission to use this material Kenneth Gross, and also Hollander’s executor, Professor Langdon Hammer.

In place of Baldwin’s appeal to ‘personal expression’ and ‘daily impressions’, Hollander taught students to see ‘reading as an essential feeder of writing.’ His course presented, in his words, ‘a set of lessons abouthow to engage with past literature, past models of writerly practice, about how they teach us to write.’ It aimed to embody ‘a philosophy of writing at once pragmatic and literary, joining conceptual rigor with an invitation to serious play.’ As such, we offer this course as a brilliant example for teachers wishing to bring together ‘criticism’ and ‘creative writing’, reading and writing – and especially instructive for the way it reflects Hollander’s unusually well-informed understanding of Renaissance teaching practices, and encourages students to digest ancient, early modern, and foreign texts into their own ’creative’ and ‘expository’ writing – though Hollander wished to complicate that distinction too.

Each week students were given ‘a mini-anthology of exemplary texts, ranging from ancient to modern, from the literary to the scientific, keyed to the exercises themselves’, and asked to write in response to these models. Thus writing was seen not so much as ‘personal expression’ deriving from experience, but ‘a kind of exploratory problem-solving, taking students through a linked and ever-changing series offormal challenges, letting them discover how writers must take responsibility for their own inventions’. The aim was that ‘Each piece of the week’s work joins play and rigor in striking ways, asking students to challenge both their reason and their imagination, and to see how the different facets of their work might connect with others.’

Hollander developed the course over its first decade ‘with the input of participating faculty and graduate students.’ Each week focused ‘on a distinct issue in expository writing, the topics unfolding over thecourse of the semester from the simple to the complex — for example, the making of lists, the punctuating of sentences, the composition of analytic or descriptive narratives, the study of point of view, the creation of dialogues and characters, models of agreement and disagreement, and so on.’ Hollander stressed ‘the importance, where possible, of reading aloud from the literary examples thataccompany each assignment, so that students get the sounds and rhythms of the words in their ears.’ There were lectures each Monday to ‘set up the writing projects for the week.’  ‘Assignments consisted of five inter-linked problems or exercises, requiring the students compose a page or so of text per day.’ The assignments were structured so that ‘each day’s work [built] dialectically on the previous ones,again moving from the simple to the more complex.’ At the end of the week, ‘each student had an hour, which most often became two, to talk over the five assignments one-on-one with their writing tutor.’ This emphasis on one-to-one discussion of writing exercises harks back to the foundation of Daily Themes. In his 1907 course catalogue entry, Baldwin had also promised ‘Regular weekly appointments for criticism of individuals.’

Hollander and Gross give the first week, on catalogues and analogues, as a good example of the course’s spirit. Students ‘are set to explore the nature of lists and catalogues, their different forms, rhythms, and uses, to see how lists can organize and reorganize knowledge, and how they create connections between ideas, words, and things. Each day’s work unfolds the theme. For the first day, students must generate a series of different types of list, then take one of these and shape the sequence of words so that the list may build to a climax, fall away, subdivide itself, and so on. The second day they are asked to embed each item of the previous day’s list in a sentence, and then build the sentences into a paragraph. On the third day they must use the same list to compose an entirely different paragraph. The fourth continues this process more wildly, suggesting students begin with a random permutation of their original lists, perhaps burying or hiding certain elements in their paragraphs. The fifth day allows to the students to take any two sentences from the previous day, using them to start and conclude a paragraph now unshackled by the list.’

‘Other weeks have a similar rhythm of theme and variation. A week on argument, for example, asks students to explore different ways of arguing for a particular proposition. They have not just to propound alternative arguments, but to explore different styles of agreement and disagreement, to find antithetical ways of supporting a chosen proposition, to discover forms of proof only apparently cogent, or to give knowingly bad arguments for a position they strongly agree with. At the end of the week, they have to create a dialogue in which one person refutes another using arguments based on a misinterpretation of their opponent. A week on point of view asks them, on day 1, to consider a room, real or imaginary, viewed from both the outside and inside. On day 2 they must describe a different room, first in the voice of someone totally familiar with it and then in the words of a stranger. Day 3 asks students to compose a paragraph in which they take the point of view of one member of an opposed pair — night vs. day, land vs. sea, body vs. soul — and comment pointedly on the other half; in day 4, naturally, they must speak from the point of view of the other member of the pair. On day 5 students must choose the point of view of some figure or object imagined as somehow equidistant from both, and give a new account of the earlier argument.’

‘Something of the course’s focus on the formal difficulties and necessary play of writing, and on the literary masks that shape both our objectivity and subjectivity, will come through in these examples. It’s also important that assignments are framed in terms of unfolding doubles, parallels, and oppositions. Such exercises focus students’ attention on the shifting frames, contexts, and conditions of our modes of exposition and argument (in a way very different from the facile skepticism of many current writing textbooks).  It should also be clear how the sequence of assignments asks students both to remember and to revise what they’ve done in previous days, to turn against, expand on, or synthesize that work. A number of the weeks’ assignments, indeed, close with a moment of radical play, something that asks students to shift their angle of view, or to make a strikingly different use of the techniques they’ve been exploring on previous days. At the end of the week on analytic narrative, for instance, students are asked to describe how to make, unmake, repair, prepare or destroy something in a way that indicates the writer’s disgust with that process. After a number of days in which students have written about real and imagined characters, they were asked to compose a paragraph in which a character does something they think of as genuinely evil, yet within the boundaries of ordinary experience. Or — in another version of this assignment — they’re asked to compose an account of their own character. At the end of a week of creating dialogues, students are invited to imagine a physical setting which radically transforms their sense of what one of their dialogues has been about. These moments have, in the past; given students some of their most striking insights about the work of writing. It helps illustrate how this course tries to hold together aspects of writing that are too often divided apart into the “expository” and the “creative.” (Indeed, this is a course as useful for creative writer as arty creative writing workshop, if not more so.)’

‘The course as a whole is designed to mirror the ways in which each week’s work unfolds from day to day, building on itself, developing ever-greater degrees of complexity and sophistication, sending students back to re-examine what they’ve done in earlier weeks. It’s a way of allowing for surprise joined to recollection. The close attention to specific literary examples also makes it inevitable for students to consider their own writing as something in dialogue with the best work of past writers; they are able to see in these exemplary texts the very basic challenges that any writer faces. The readings are thus more than just static stylistic examples; they are points of engagement, challenges to understanding, and occasions for discovery. Again, this is a course as much about reading as about writing, about how students’ reading can change their ideas of writing. It is an exemplary course about exemplarity.’