Assessors of literature learning have long been concerned with the issue of difficulty and the fundamental contradictions in the term "examination of literary understanding." An alternate view of literature is that although texts are finally indeterminate, a group of them has been set aside by communities as forming a part of the communal experience. Communities have selected them to be read aesthetically, and so the texts have developed a set of associations with each other. Subsequent writers acculturated into this "tradition" produce texts which are highly allusive to this communal set of literature. Literature curriculum, therefore, has the function of bringing the individual into the community, and appears to be aimed at providing the student with the requisite knowledge of the communal canon, as well as with the ways of reading that preserve the appropriate view of the functions of texts in the community. It follows that the difficulty of text is only partially determined by various characteristics of the text itself. A text's difficulty actually depends on the nature of the understanding expected. From this revised view of the curriculum in literature and of difficulty, those concerned with assessment can derive a set of principles by which to select texts, questions concerning texts, and criteria for judging answers to the questions. (Twenty-six references are included.) (PRA)