As a teacher of technical writing, the author applauds the emphasis on the strategies of research and on documented, problem-solving writing across the curriculum and on bringing writing-for-the-workplace into the first-year writing classroom. However, as a teacher of literature, he rejects the notion that responding to literature has no practical value. He also rejects the idea that teaching literature in a composition class must be a "subterfuge," especially if instructors have sufficient training in rhetoric and composition. This article describes a pedagogy designed to re-place literature in research-based writing courses without sabotaging the primary purpose of such courses, teaching students to find personally and culturally important questions and to report their answers in documented academic writing. (Contains 1 figure and 3 notes.)