Sixteen-page pamphlet, undated, unpaginated, with no stated publisher or place of publication. Measuring 3.4" by 6.3", it can be held open comfortably in one hand. It reprints two journal pieces by Rose M. Kavana, "Some Recent Phases of English Teaching" from The Dial (November 1901) and "The Constructive Side of English Study" from The School Review (April 1902).

The pamphlet probably appeared circa 1903, when Rose Kavana's textbook Composition and Rhetoric Based on Literary Models was published by Rand McNally. It's likely that Rand McNally also published this pamphlet. The last page is an advertisement for the book. But if this pamphlet is a promo, it's still beautifully designed, with a knowledge of publishing traditions. The rubrication, elegantly used throughout, partakes of a manuscript history that goes back twenty centuries.

More interesting, though, is the author and her sense of composition pedagogy. Rose M. Kavana is identified as a teacher of English at Joseph Medill High School in Chicago. Composition and Rhetoric Based on Literary Models, however, is aimed also at "beginning courses in academies, seminaries, and normal schools." It definitely is no run-of-the-mill, grammar-thumping comp manual for high-school sophomores. Some of the method would sound radical in a school textbook published forty years later. It promotes the "studio method" of learning to write (p. 3). Examples of art are offered for students to analyze as models for rhetorical strategy, but also as "models derived from conversation in our daily life" (p. 7). The textbook is organized around the discourse modes but it does not treat them in isolation. Narration, description, and exposition are combined, for instance, to inform assignments of the character sketch and the biographical essay. This is no slouch of a textbook (Kavana's co-author, Arthur Beatty, was already on his way to becoming the famous Wordsworth scholar and editor of De Quincey, Hazlitt, Macaulay, Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne).

In 1920, Kavana published another composition textbook, The Elements of English Composition (Boston: The Gordon Press), single authored this time. In some ways it is even more eccentric and forward-looking. Oral presentations are assigned before written essays. Narrative plotlines and combinations of modes are broken down to familiar life-experiences, illustrated with short passages from literary works, and then rendered as discourse topics. None of this is simplistic. Under the category "Incident" for oral compositions, Kavana identifies thirty or more plotlines ("The Return After an Absense to Find Changes," "The Blessing that Becomes a Curse," etc.). For example, the experience of "Sacrifice of Self or What One Holds Dear" is illustrated from Longfellow, the fall of Troy, and Hugo's Ninety-Three, and then turned into a topic for oral recitation: "Have you ever known any one who insisted too little on his own rights and invited aggression of those not inclined to regard the rights of others? Tell the class about him" (pp. 80-81).

This is all I can tell the class about Rose M. Kavana, high-school English teacher extraordinaire. I'd love to hear from you if you have more information.

RH, May 2004