Competing views of written texts, of the process of writing, and of the purposes of the scholarly investigation of written discourse appear inherently at odds. Today composition theory is often demeaned as being only pedagogical while literary study is granted the status of a self-fulfilling academic pursuit. What is needed is a model or matrix that could establish scholarly interaction between the two fields. Such a model would have to address (1) the nature of a written text--its capacity for analysis as both a product of a prior activity and the reflection of a human process; (2) the nature of a writing event, whether defined as an act of recording meaning or as a unique, individual, indeterminate event; (3) the relation of both individual texts and discrete writing events to intertextuality--the history of texts and their conventions; (4) the relation of the individual writer to a particular text, to a particular writing event, and to the history and conventions at a particular moment of writing; (5) the relation of the public impact of writing to the individual writer; and (6) the propriety of research questions, evidence, or methods within the study of the foregoing issues. (HOD)