In this article, the author challenges English teachers of literature to examine applications of reader response theory in teaching reading which posit that readers approach a text from two stances: "aesthetic" (emotional) or "efferent" (literal). The essay presents a case study of pre-service English teachers and adolescents'…

The imperial hubris, insecurities and indifference of our bloody new millennium pose profound challenges to feminist anti-racist and anti-colonial educators. For those of us who turn to literature education to create spaces of sustained moral reflection, there is a particular challenge to think through the kinds of reading practices which might…

This essay explores a reading of "Robinson Crusoe" that suggests the novel has taken on new gravity after the first "preemptive" war in U.S. history, a war justified by the attempt to "spread freedom" to Iraq. It examines how Crusoe comes to understand the relationship between the state and the individual. Robinson…

This article is a retrospective account of the legacy of Paul Goodman's major educational works: "Growing Up Absurd"; "Compulsory Mis-education, and The Community of Scholars"; and "The New Reformation." It is argued here that what remains of interest in Goodman's work is to be found in the tropes and the anarchic Zeitgeist of his work. The legacy…

Discusses how reader response techniques, by bringing students together into interpretive communities, encourage students' real interactions with literary texts, and foster greater awareness of audience. (SR)

Argues that the exclusion of the literature of women, of black, ethnic, and working-class writers from the established literary canon has less to do with valuations of literary quality than with the social distribution of power. (SRT)

Describes an approach to teaching George Orwell's "1984," emphasizing the main characters' struggles through the themes of innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, love and hate, discovery and creation, and death. Notes that this reader-response approach forces students into the process of self-examination. (MM)

Suggests that literature is central to teachers' personal lives and to their teaching; literature connects readers to the lives and perspectives of others; sharing transactions and interpretation in literature study enriches personal and classroom life; and literature has the potential to change attitudes and values. (RS)

Describes how students in secondary classrooms create artistic "symbols" in response to literature, thus becoming a connection between a student's interpretation of meaning and an author's text. (SR)

Discusses responsive reading, resistant reading, and dialogical reading in literature instruction. Uses William Carlos Williams' short story, "The Use of Force," to illustrate these reading processes, in particular that of dialogical reading. (SR)

Offers a Pyrrhonist reading of "Hamlet." Describes an experiment in teaching that attempts to reconstruct for literature students the prudential-ethical context of human rhetoric, placing "prudentia," or practical wisdom, at the center of their own imaginative involvement. (PRA)

Describes how a high school student was able to express powerful feelings and achieve some kind of reconciliation with his father through his therapeutic exploration of Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman." (PRA)

Presents two responses to Meredith Kopald's article, "Arthur Miller Wins a Peace Prize: Teaching, Literature, and Therapy" in the same issue of this journal. (PRA)

In this essay, "Viewpoints: Transaction versus Interaction--A Terminological Rescue Operation," originally published in 1985 ("Research in the Teaching of English," 19, 96-107), Rosenblatt points out that no text can guarantee that the experience it provides will be "literary." A poem might be read for the emotional and intellectual experience it…

There is an abundance of theory concerning the effects of reading literature. Some researchers do reveal effects, but few explain them. When they do, the textual features examined are neither necessary nor sufficient for literariness. Three experiments are presented here that study the relation between literary text quality and literary reading…