Despite a growing trend to split the two areas, literature belongs in the composition class. In responding to literature, students can trace their own developing thought. They acquire, through literary discourse, a tool of discovery. This tool closely resembles expressive discourse, the mode, as James Kinneavy suggests in "A Theory of Discourse," with which language use begins. In both the writer becomes the primary audience and initial subject, a spectator attempting to evaluate his or her own experiences. A major error in writing courses, and, more specifically, in the use of literature to teach composition, is hurrying the student too quickly from the expressive to the persuasive or informative mode. In the informative analyses or argument papers required in most literary themes, the writer must make the difficult shift from what James Britton calls the spectator's role as reader of literature to the participant's role as objective analyst. If given enough time, however, students will gradually develop their own rhetorical context, shaping their relationships among speaker, subject, and audience. As they have the same aim--discovery--and the same stance--the spectator's, literary and expressive discourse clearly can work well together to improve thinking and writing skills. (MM)