We set out to investigate Miller's curious assertion--curious for a deconstructionist committed to a critique of the old metaphysics of presence--that literary works preexist their being written down. We find a basis for this sense of the preexistence of the literary work in Miller's insights about the performative dynamics of reading and writing.…

This essay questions the digital humanities' dependence on interpretation and critique as strategies for reading and responding to texts. Instead, the essay proposes suggestion as a digital rhetorical practice, one that does not replace hermeneutics, but instead offers alternative ways to respond to texts. The essay uses the Occupy movement as an…

Although emotions are an important facet of teaching and learning in all classes, emotional literacy plays an especially significant role in classes that engage critically with difference. My article redefines and theorizes critical emotional literacy, proposing that we understand it as a social practice that must be developed not only by means of…

Through an account of how his own students analyzed Ira Sher's short story "The Man in the Well," the author calls for teachers of literature to value and attend to their classes' misreadings rather than replace them with corrective interpretations. He argues that probing these misreadings enables one to see the limits imposed by any single…

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification. In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work's characters. With the second step, students examine how the work's cultural and historical…

The author explains how principles of cognitive science can help teachers of literature use texts as a means of increasing students' commitment to social justice. Applying these principles to a particular work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, he calls particular attention to the relationship between cognitive science and literary schemes for building reader…

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…

Although "close reading" remains a worthwhile goal for undergraduate English courses, the term has actually been defined in numerous ways, which need to be compared and assessed. Unfortunately, the version of it spread by the New Critics has intimidated students, making them feel unable to decipher a literary text's real meaning. They…

Although, by the time of her death, Louise Rosenblatt was highly respected in the fields of composition and reading theory, she did not enjoy the same status among literary theorists. In this article, the author argues that Rosenblatt should be taken seriously as a literary theorist. The author shares her views on Rosenblatt's "Literature as…

Asserts that post-structuralism cannot be applied to literary texts because to talk about applying post-structuralism assumes: (1) free-standing subjects; (2) free-standing objects of investigation; (3) free-standing methods; and (4) free-standing interpretation. (RAE)

Claims that Tom is a character eminently suited to the multiplicity and subjectivity arguments of reader response criticism (RRC), that meaning is a relation between an author, a text, and a reader, not an object, as New Criticism held, and not a procedure, as RRC assumes. (RAE)

Considers the possibility that engaging a text need not proceed through a preexisting program and, further, that another style of engagement may indicate intriguing possibilities for resistance. Demonstrates a type of criticism called "productive reading." Concludes that it is not sufficient to assume that reading must proceed through a…

Argues that revisionist and ecological criticism are two different activities. Describes the differences, then proposes ecological approaches for the study of literature, rhetoric, and composition. (FL)

Highlights Canadian writer George Bowering's view of reading as metaphor and process (shaping both his fiction and his developing sense of interpretation as a political act) by focusing on two of his books, "Burning Water" and "Caprice." (SR)

Suggests that doing literary criticism is how teachers and students hear other voices as they read, instead of projections of themselves. Espouses the study of style as the vehicle of literary criticism. Proposes a definition of style. (RS)