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 necessitates stacking the curricular deck. Both the goals of transformation and enculturation can, however, be accommodated by the notion of literature as a dream for awakened minds. What requires resolution is how badly the dream is wanted and how conscious of that dream students are allowed to become, how much educators and parents are willing to risk the way things are in order to let happen the way things might be. Like literacy itself, response to literature is a deeply ambivalent enterprise. Increased attention to how literary texts are experienced and understood will perhaps alleviate the anxiety associated with such ambivalence. Using Alfred North Whitehead's three stages of mastering a discipline--romance, precision, and generalization--brings to mind the politics of engagement as moving literature educators from the first stage of romancing the response to the stage of precision--to confronting the issue of literature's ambiguous explosive power. Students must enjoy reading, to be sure; otherwise they don't read, but they must also be reading epistemologists--at least of their own reading--such that managing their own literary responses becomes one of the basics they move ahead to. (Thirteen references are attached.) (RAE)