As a picture of childhood composed from the point of view of a young boy named Freddie, who suffers the effects of repeated and ongoing trauma, the experience of reading "The Freddie Stories" presents a number of interpretive challenges: its main character is often split and in various states of disassociation, the difference between…

Engaging students in completing assigned reading material, particularly textbooks, is a challenge faced by many college professors. Further, research has demonstrated student compliance is typically low with reading course textbooks. This study explores the impact of assigning content-specific books written for popular audiences and having…

E-book reading is generally considered suboptimal because people engaging in e-book reading tend to browse through digital texts. As a result, studies concerning students' e-book preference in academic contexts have shown that students less prefer using e-books than hardcopy books when engaging in academic reading which is considered intensive…

Private student discourses are often ignored or prohibited in the academy; however, these private discourses are very meaningful, and representative of the ways that students order and speak about the world. Specifically, religion is an extremely significant private student discourse; exploring religious discourse might help students not only to…

Readers, texts, and readings can take unpredictable and seemingly tangential detours that educators might find undesirable and difficult to control. Readers can stray far from the text to seek out desired meanings. In the same way, media outlets can reappropriate favorite literary fictions in ways that can perturb educators and readers alike.…

This article contains excerpts from the author's two seminal texts: "Literature as Exploration (New York: MLA, 1938) and "The Reader, the Text, the Poem" (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). In "Literature as Exploration," the author first presented her transactional theory of reading as she explored the personal, social,…

In this essay, the author explains not only how she came to write her classic text "Literature as Exploration," but she also describes the path of her own professional journey. A conviction about the difference between "literary" and other reading led to her writing "Literature as Exploration" in the first place. In this book, she argued that…