Reading is an integral part of scholarly practice, though we do not often discuss how our approaches to reading differ, and how these approaches may ultimately make interpretive impact on our research. This essay considers approaches to reading in light of the concepts of proximity and orientation. Though formal "close reading" is a…

A key instructional goal of English language arts instruction is teaching students to read and interpret complex literary texts. This report reviews the literature on the development and pedagogy of literary analysis skills. It analyzes literary analysis skills as a "key practice," a bundle of disciplinary skills and strategies that form…

An important purpose of reading literature is to move beyond the literal text to construct an interpretation of what the text conveys about the human condition and nature of the world. In two experiments, college students with no prior training in literary analysis read a short story and responded to one of four task instructions (plot, ambiguous,…

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to…

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work's characters. For us, such attachments constitute "reading badly." But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work's author. A consideration of critical responses to "Benito Cereno" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" enables us to…

There is something very democratic and creative about reader-response criticism. In a reader-response classroom, students progress from passive to active reading, from discovering a text to creating one. Also, students progress from passive to active reading, from discovering a text to creating one. However, a problem emerges when the spirit and…

Argues that D.H. Lawrence's "The Rainbow" can be interpreted as a parable of all reading of literature because its plot tolerates the wish for resolution as long as nothing is taken to be final. Concludes that all interpretations are merely provisional, lasting only until another comes along. (SRT)

Decontextualization, referring to the abstraction of a written text from all of its contexts, is a flawed concept. Rather than viewing writing as an isolated abstraction, a text's involvement with the human world should be acknowledged. Two major questions arise when dealing with the concept of decontextualization: (1) Can written discourse be…

Asking how what an individual knows shapes the ways in which he or she reads, this book starts from the premise that any productive theory of narrative must take into account the presuppositions the reader brings to the text. The book explores how prior knowledge of literary conventions influences the processes of interpretation and evaluation. It…

When reading educators encounter a student's interpretation of a text that is different than that which an author may have intended, they have to determine if such an interpretation is valid according to their criteria for students. Much of this rests with educators' conceptions of the reading process and the role of the reader in the…

Shows how the enthymeme can organize a reader's participation in the text, specifically, George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant." (SRT)

In her literature and composition classes, an educator encourages students to correlate their memory and imagination to the rhetorical elements of logos, pathos, and ethos and construct regenerative structures of knowledge through a comprehensive and objective understanding of a contextualized problem. She employs Bakhtin's dialogic method of…

Articles in this journal issue explore the relationship between the reader and the literature text, and discuss ways that instruction can enhance reader response to that literature. Following an introduction summarizing the nine articles, the titles and their authors are as follows: (1) "It Is the Poem That I Remake: Using Kenneth Burke's…

Teaching models, derived from theory and research, are static, and lack responsibility. Models substitute an abstracted notion for teachers. Literature can be viewed as a field of play, where meaning opens, rather than as a body of knowledge. The teacher's challenge consists of posing questions that allow students to formulate their takes on a…

Recommends that children, teachers, and parents critically read children's literature to identify and clarify ideological perspectives. Lists types of books for multicultural collections, presents guidelines for critical discussions about books, and identifies types of biases in books. Suggests that children's books open multiple perspectives…