Advocates a balance between engagement and disengagement, between overintellectualizing and oversentimentalizing in literary criticism. Recommends literature education as dialectic and gaining the best of both worlds--engagement and detachment. (JDH)

Discusses the role of literature in the secondary school English curriculum, then examines the current state of literary criticism and analysis in the classroom. (FL)

Examines a high school literature censorship case, and challenges the assumption that values can be "absorbed" through emotional engagement with a "transparent" text. Concludes with guidelines for avoiding indoctrination by viewing literature as the construction of fictional worlds whose values are decoded by calculated acts of…

A literary communication model cannot adjudicate the conflicting claims of transformation and enculturation: that literature is intrinsically educational, that it conduces to psychic growth as a process, irrespective of subject matter and free from the dangers of indoctrination, but that the imperative to make it instrumental to political ends…

Examines the study of literature and literary values, the need for such study, and the problem of justifying such study. (RL)