Literary scholars use specific critical lenses called "topoi" (Fahnestock & Secor, 1991) to read literature and write their interpretations of these texts. Literary topoi are used in the discourse of modern college literature classrooms (Wilder, 2002) and are associated with higher grades in students' literature classes (Wilder, 2002, 2005).…

This study investigated responses by fifteen- and sixteen-year-old students to poetry in three interview situations--affectively-oriented, cognitively-oriented, or nondirective--and the relationship of the responses to interview method, sex, and reading level. The responses were assigned to the five categories of Personal Association, Moral…