A question that captured our attention many years ago and continues to motivate our work, although the audience for that work has expanded and contracted over the years, is "What about reading?" In this essay we adopt a term used to frame discussion at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)--remix--to revisit in three…

Examines the view that readers read different texts and create the text they read. Argues that (1) this view is a form of conceptual relativism; (2) the view is incoherent; and (3) work on radical interpretation offers a much more satisfactory account of why interpretations of texts differ so radically and better explains the value of studying…

Increasingly, autistic students are attending college, posing new challenges to writing instructors. In particular, such students may have trouble imagining readers' responses to their texts. Developing an appropriate pedagogy for these students may involve revisiting composition studies' tradition of cognitive research, while not abandoning more…

Provides a theoretical framework by which traditional prosody might be reformulated according to reader response insight. Advocates prosody taking the form of a "story of reading." Advocates a narrative style of prosodic criticism. (HB)

Broadens the space for a discussion of reading based in some degree of theorizing that has already occurred within the community of African-American critics and scholars. Argues that those engaged in reader-oriented approaches to literature need to intervene in the canonical debates and the critical practices of noncanonical literatures through…

Seeks to add another vocabulary to the pedagogy of the creative writing workshop: the language of use and action, of practice and implementation. Investigates how to reform the discursive walls between creativity and theory and ends by suggesting how educators might bring classrooms and communities together. (RS)

Indicates how current stylistic criticism might engage ideological issues by more fully developing M. Bakhtin's ideas through an approach called cultural stylistics. Notes that Bakhtin's own work was very much concerned with the divorce between ideological and formalist analysis, and his "sociological stylistics" was intended to…

Explores questions about the use of history in teaching literature and about the relation between academic reading (with its emphasis on form and the objectification of the reading process) and naive reading (which depends on a psychological identification with a character). Illustrates these issues through a discussion of a feminist reader's…

Describes a teacher's unsuccessful attempt to introduce the poetry of Tu Fu, a wayward bureaucrat of the T'ang dynasty, to a class of part-time students. Uses his students' resistance to this poetry as an occasion to discuss the importance of personal responses to poetry, as opposed to "correct" academic responses. (TB)

Provides the reactions of Louise M. Rosenblatt, a key figure in the field of reader response criticism, to the developments in reading, writing, and critical theory in the 1980s. Gives a brief personal history of Rosenblatt and the field. Describes her transactional theory and interpretations of it by other critics. (HB)

Clarifies some common misconceptions about the nature of narcissism and projection and employs recent developments in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory to explain how projective activities are filtered and altered by a certain notion of textual objectivity: objectivity as defined by the text's material signifiers. (FL)

Compares the theories of writing style advocated by Barthes and Coles. (FL)

Presents a criticism of Evan Carton's description of a writing assignment, noting the contradiction between the assignment's real purpose and the rigid writing restrictions inherent in the assignment that preclude the purpose. Presents Carton's response. (HTH)

Suggests an approach to literature (derived from post-structuralism and deconstructionism) which goes beyond the concept of "teacher as authority," without totally abandoning form or structure. Demonstrates this approach in a discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" and Philip Larkin's poem "High…

Discusses reader-response theory and forces that mitigate against a reading-centered classroom. Asserts that the issues of authority and freedom are crucial but advises against demanding too much at this stage. Focuses on current practice, and suggests beginning with the routines, the "business as usual," of the literature classroom.…