I suggest that, in universities, we often use the word "understanding" when we mean "overstanding". This is connected to relying on limited approaches to reading, ones that are forgetful of religious ways of reading. I offer a critical retrieval of religious ways of reading, practised in the past, and suggest how they might be included in the…

Presents the text of an account of the author's research. Notes that the text's four layers (scientific report, reflective analysis, personal history, and deliberative appeal) are each indispensable yet individually inadequate to the task. Considers the tensions among possible accounts of the research and what these tensions say about the reading…

The idea of experience needs to be examined before the experiential aspect of literary reading can be understood, and before literary reading as an ethical practice can properly be defined. Open-mindedness is necessary when fostering student interpretations of a literary text, just as it is necessary for accepting the varying life experiences of…

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 condition called "reader's block" whereby the mind fails to comprehend the meaning of the text because of digressing thoughts. Suggests that "freereading," like freewriting, can help to clarify thoughts. Argues that it is not necessary to read things correctly the first time through. (PRA)

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)

Problematizes the word "experience" as it is currently being used by researchers and teachers who want to reform literature instruction in schools and colleges. Discusses how a fresh look at Dewey and Rosenblatt can reconstruct the courtroom and marketplace metaphors as sound alternatives to theories that perpetuate dualistic assumptions…

Attempts to show in detail how the human literary activity called literary interpretation consists of personal selection and use of communal tools. (CRH)

Examines whether "social reading" can facilitate literary engagement. Indicates that social readers made a greater attempt to convey meaning than did nonsocial readers, but were less engaged with the text as literary discourse. (SKC)

Discusses some concrete examples of the kinds of conflicts that can surface when reader-response theory is actually practiced in the classroom, and considers some of the implications. Urges instructors to make room for contesting views and to facilitate serious, committed, personal interchanges. (MS)

Studies the ways readers create meaning initially from literary texts. Analyzes the data collected via think-aloud protocols and interviews. Compares reading tactics of first-year college students and graduate students. (HB)

Argues that a fresh look at some aspects of reader response theories could have a revitalizing effect on classroom practices. Suggests that for students to respond to texts, they will have to make more use of what happens while they read. Exemplifies some reader response strategies through the author's own responses to a short story. Suggests…

An exercise in ghostwriting--a process where the reader completes a section of the text in the reader's head based on clues in the text--was used in freshman composition and upper-level composition classes to get students to concentrate on their reading processes. In this assignment, a short story was chosen from which different portions of the…

A study examined the utility of latent partition analysis for describing the structure of emotional responses in reading. Subjects in the first experiment, 40 undergraduate university students, read a 2,100-word story and then immediately reported any scenes or events that evoked an emotional response and any mental images they recalled from…

Examines coherence between sentences in a paragraph, arguing that readers require coherence at this level as well as between paragraphs. Discusses continuative and discontinuative relationships between sentences, including (1) sequence, (2) exemplification, (3) addition, (4) replacement, (5) contrast, and (6) alternation. (HTH)