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Re-writing English Education: A Review of Robert Yagelski’s Writing as a Way of Being

Given the Cartesian influence in mainstream American education, writing instruction has come to reflect a dualistic worldview, with the writer understood as an autonomous observer/knower. As such, writing instructors have the potential to convey problematic lessons about the self as entirely separate from the world. This essay delineates a corrective to the Cartesian mindset in mainstream writing instruction: Yagelski’s ontological theory of writing as a way of being-in-the-world. In the spirit of connectedness Yagelski espouses, I consider the ways in which Yagelski’s ontological theory of writing might work in tandem with Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading. Together, Yagelski and Rosenblatt allow English educators to reimagine reading and writing as activities with the ethical potential to repair the rifts of a dualistic worldview, and ultimately to reimagine English education as a field that breaks the Cartesian frame.