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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 correct understanding and to glimpse the richness of the potential text.

Author Sue Monk Kidd, who is white, employs stereotypes of African Americans and problematically appropriates features of black writing in her novel “The Secret Life of Bees”. Nevertheless, this book is worth teaching, not only because it has acquired much cultural capital but also because it offers students a way to examine relationships between whites and blacks in American literature and culture.

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. Yet her book The Reader, The Text, The Poem can now be seen as a precursor of contemporary literary theory’s “ethical turn.”

Reviewed are A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Stephen H. Sumida, Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung, and Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, edited by M. Evelina Galang.

Recognizing that many of us teach the medieval English women mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in survey courses, this essay attempts to put these writers in context for teachers who may have only a passing familiarity with the period. Focusing on passages of their writings found in the Longman and Norton anthologies of British literature, the author shows how these women responded to and shaped sociopolitical issues of their day, particularly questions of heresy and disorder as threats to Catholic institutional stability, the role of Mendicant teachings for the laity of the church, and the rise of the cult of the Eucharist.

College English, Volume 66, Number 2, November 2003 Johnnie M. Stover is associate professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of instruction and research include American literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with specializations in African American, American Indian, and women’s literatures. Portions of this essay appear in her book, Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography (University Press of Florida, 2003). T Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography as Social Discourse: The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs

_ nce, in an early British literature course, I was assigned to write an analysis of Shakespeare's That time of year thou mayest in me behold. I tried hard to get myself out of the essay (and thus out of the sonnet), but my effort was a C at best. On the last page, my professor drew a large box (to represent the whole sonnet) and three smaller boxes inside (to represent the parts of the sonnet). Paraphrasing John Ciardi, she wrote

n 1937 Meridel Le Sueur authored a textbook, Worker Writers, for use in writing classes she offered under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration in Minnesota. To illustrate for her students the basic principles of storytelling and narrative technique, Le Sueur included an annotated version of her short story, Biography of My Daughter. The story focuses on the firstperson narrator's visit to a state-run sanitarium to see a young friend, Rhoda. Upon arriving at the hospital, the narrator learns she has come too late: Rhoda has died. Although her friend's death will be officially attributed to tuberculosis, the narrator knows that months of anxiously searching for a job; of working sixteen hours a day when employment was to be had; and of standing in long relief lines when no jobs were available had punished Rhoda's body beyond repair. The narrator recognizes that Rhoda has died of starvation (29; all page numbers refer to the first edition of Worker Writers). As the narrator drives back to Minneapolis with Rhoda's grieving family, they pass through fields with round pumpkins [...] corn fattening, [and] melons like the crescent moons of the season (34). The abundance of the natural world stands in stark contrast to the privations known by Rhoda and other women like her during the Great Depression. From the narrator's perspective, a system of proprietary control of resources by private individuals has led to grotesque social inequities and created a world in which young women like Rhoda starve amidst abundance. In using Biography of My Daughter as an illustrative short story in Worker Writers, Le Sueur astutely highlights important tensions between public property and private ownership. For Le Sueur, a social activist and member of the Commu-

onsider Pauline Hopkins's short story Talma Gordon (1900), first published in the Colored American Magazine. Like many Hopkins's writings, Talma Gordon takes up the issue the tragic mulatto and the larger theme miscegenation. In this text, however, she frames these social issues in the form detective fiction, the locked-room mystery structure that Edgar Allan Poe inaugurated with Murders in the Rue Morgue. The story opens at the Canterbury Club Boston, a private club composed wealthy, well-connected white men who gather monthly to discuss questions of vital importance to the life the Republic, such as that evening's topic, Expansion: Its Effect upon the Future Development the Anglo-Saxon throughout the World (4). The speaker, Dr. William Thornton, argues that despite the efforts to thwart intermarriage among races, it is inevitable, even between the white Boston Brahmins and the far-off tribes dark-skinned peoples (5). If are not ready to receive and assimilate the new material which will be brought to mingle with our pure Anglo-Saxon stream, Thornton warns, we should call a halt in our expansion policy (5). Arguing that man is powerless to combat both fate and the laws the Omnipotent, Thornton avers that

Argues that issues of generic hybridity embody multicultural literature while promoting another kind of multiculturalism that reflects the current debates about literary canons in general and the field of American literature in particular. Considers how a reading of texts that relies on all of their component parts allows literature to perform a vital function, to foster an informed and compassionate vision of the different.

Incites inquiry as to how modern American literature reflects on the problem of identity. Spotlights the contribution to modern American writing by Wallace Thurman’s "Harlem" fiction. Endeavors to link a racial imperative to a sexual imperative by means of a current theoretical discourse surrounding notions of city and community life.

In three voices - one as a scholar, one as a writer, and one as an alcoholic - Hindman considers the question: in what ways can our own personal writing illuminate the theory and practice of teaching composition? Demonstrating the process of composing the self within the professional, she responds both passionately and personally to literary criticisms about recovery discourse. Her purpose is to “make writing matter” and, in doing so, to attempt to dispel the tension between competing versions of how the self is constructed. She also considers how, in and for recovery, she learned to write, and how it has affected her professional writing. This type of writing, which she has called “embodied rhetoric,” offers lessons for composing a better life.

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.

Examines assumptions of “oppositional” literary criticism, namely the assumption that older-style “objective” literary criticism must, in its political silence, be supportive of dominant ideologies.

Rehearses some 20th-century narratives as they have appeared in United States history and as they have been represented in African-American literature. Suggests that some of these narratives are insufficiently critical in their construction of stereotypes or in their over-romanticized notions of racial memory, which mask the complications of color and racial identity in the United States.

Rehearses some 20th-century narratives as they have appeared in United States history and as they have been represented in African-American literature. Suggests that some of these narratives are insufficiently critical in their construction of stereotypes or in their over-romanticized notions of racial memory, which mask the complications of color and racial identity in the United States.

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ur Ptolemaic system of literary categories goes creaking and groaning onward, in spite of the widely acknowledged need overhaul it in response multiculturalism. This is not say that there have not been attempts revise course design in light of new materials and methods. For example, G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson's Writing and Reading Differently (1985), Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson's Gender in the Classroom (1990), and James A. Berlin and Michael J. Vivion's Cultural Studies in the English Classroom (1992) address the pedagogical consequences of deconstruction, feminist literary theory, and cultural studies, respectively, and also incorporate more diverse literatures. these attempts foster innovation in the individual classroom still leave the basic structure of English studies intact. In Kristin Ross's description of the multicultural world and cultural studies program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she comments indirectly on this problem when she identifies as one stumbling block the Santa Cruz program the faculty's unwillingness to depart from their specialized fields (668). They fended off demands diversify their course material with plaints like But I don't have a PhD in South African literature (668). Ross gives good reasons for forging ahead in spite of such protests, but she doesn't say much about the underlying structure of English studies that still makes us think our scholarship must be organized along national or chronological lines, even though these are inimical the process of integrating new materials and methods because devised serve and protect the old ones.

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ere is seldom mentioned but universally known fact of our profession, bluntly stated: the vast majority of our undergraduate students do not love or appreciate literature as we do. Indeed, the value of studying literature, the rewards of reading, are not immediately apparent to surprisingly large number of students, despite vaguely conceived (and externally imposed) notion that reading serious literature is somehow essential to becoming a wellrounded person. So we shake our heads in dismay, share our war stories in faculty lounges, rejoice in our occasional successes, and generally bemoan these students' lack of interest, spotty education, and limited life experiences; the sorry state of basic literacy in recent years; the dismal and misguided teaching conducted in high schools; and, eventually, the anti-intellectual strain in American culture itself, exacerbated by television, Danielle Steel, and Stephen King. Embedded in all this are unstated inklings that our entire enterprise may be suspect or indefensibly elitist. And it was ever so. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History is replete with accounts of MLA addresses from the turn of the century onwards which express concern over students' indifference to literary studies and to the latest professional trends in literary theory. Even the decades-long debates over scholarship vs. criticism chronicled by Graff on occasion find it necessary to deal, somewhat reluctantly, with pedagogy and classroom applications. Not often enough, it has always seemed to me. This and other sweeping generalizations that follow, along with some radical observations-and few suggestions-are intended to refocus attention on what I take to be the principal function of college literature teachers, their primary raison d'etre: teaching undergraduates.

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William J. Spurlin, Theorizing Signifying(g) and the Role of the Reader: Possible Directions for African-American Literary Criticism, College English, Vol. 52, No. 7, African-American Criticism (Nov., 1990), pp. 732-742

One of the most obdurate institutional restraints in literary criticism is the periodization of literature for purposes of teaching, of analysis, and of specialization. These periods, created by a male-dominated literary establishment for a predominantly male literary tradition and sanctioned by a chronological inevitability, may be fictions, but they have the tenacity of convenience and convention. Even after feminist critics have worked successfully to recover neglected women writers and to place established women writers in the canon, the old periodization of literary studies holds firm. For example, when Modernism is stretched to include women and blacks, the new term High Modernists arises to relegate the additions to what presumably would be the status of Low Modernists. In reconsidering the question of periodization from a feminist perspective, the best place to start is with a major woman writer. For this purpose, Emily Dickinson is ideal because her writing life spanned literary periods and her poetry dominates the century in which she wrote. Generally credited as the greatest woman poet and a major influence on all subsequent women writers, Dickinson is nonetheless set in the literary period of American Transcendentalism, not as the jewel in its crown, but rather as a writer in the Emersonian and Romantic male tradition (see Homans and Diehl). Yet the genre in which she exclusively writes distinguishes her from the American Transcendentalists, and the attitudes she takes toward the lyric I, her art, and her audience are all quite different from theirs. In this statement, I draw no revolutionary conclusions: Dickinson is generally considered so far outside the main currents of the period that she is not always included in major studies of the time (see Matthiessen and Irwin). She does not fit in, I want to argue, because she belongs to a later period, and the reason she belongs to a later period is that she did not fit into her own. In this situation, she may be typical of many women writers who look forward to the next literary period-the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, for example, who has a certain Romantic strain in her poetry, or the Modernist Gertrude Stein, who exemplifies the experiments of Post-Modernism. My reasoning about Dickinson is not so circular as it might at first appear, and it is pertinent to the problems that women writers pose to periodization.

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Literary theories put forward by Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Walter Michaels, and Jonathan Culler all insist, to varying degrees, that any individual critic's view of a particular literary text is likely to be affected by certain assumptions (schemata) shared by the community of scholars to which the critic belongs. Literary interpretation, so the argument goes, is not a matter of individual perception alone; every interpretation is both a process of individual discovery and a product of shared interpretive strategies. From this reader-response perspective, then, the prior assumptions held by the interpretive community are crucial constituents of the discourse, and often, as in the case of the Canadian interpretive response, such shared assumptions form the paradigm that in time becomes the locus of critical authority. Canadian criticism, in particular that branch which focuses on prairie fiction, offers an intriguing case study of just such an interpretive community at work. Canadian literary criticism has long spoken if not with one voice then at least with a widely-shared critical intent: to further the aims of cultural nationalism by establishing a critical narrative that privileges those aspects of Canadian literature-the lonely prairie landscape, the implacable brooding force of Nature, the sense of human isolation-that are historically associated with the early Canadian pioneer experience and the process of nation-building. Once accepted, the narrative assumes paradigmatic status: it establishes a closed frame of reference marked by remarkable critical consensus. Such a state of critical concord has not gone unnoticed. In his retrospective look at the teaching of Canadian literature, John Harker explains that

Although Canadian literature is part of a complex known as New World literatures, it differs from other American literatures in its historic recognition of both French and English as official languages. Finally-and this fact is often overlooked, even in Canada-the federal government's multicultural policy provides a climate in which other literatures are permitted to flourish in a variety of ways. Taken together, these facts have certain implications that merit exploration.

R.W.B. Lewis' biography of Edith Wharton mentions with her other late works the 1934 short story Fever as a masterpiece of rhetorical coherence, but insists that in writing the piece Wharton was unperturbed by news from Europe of a terrible ... at hand (Biography 527). He suggests that the pervading tone of calm and repose in the story underscores her virtual mastery of history, of the past-both Wharton's own past and, in particular, the question of her paternity-as as the past of the species represented by the Roman ruins. Yet her Fever questions origins, persecution, and sexual violence-Rome itself a powerful site of primal violence. Her story interrogates society's periodic demand for an ultimate return to origins: whether it be racial purification or sexual housekeeping. Lewis writes that the possibility of Wharton's illegitimacy must have edged its way into Mrs. Wharton's mind over the years that followed [1908-09: the years in which the rumor began]. . . . situation of Grace Ansley's whole lifetime is revealed in a single phrase, and just possibly, with all obliqueness, one phase of Edith Wharton's situation as well (Collected Stories xxv). question of race and origin, which is central to Fever, also centers the moment of history-the terrible revolution brewing in Europe. Many critics would agree with Lewis about Wharton's apolitical, serene, and new state of being in the thirties (Biography 524). Cynthia Griffin Wolff does not deal with Wharton's politics at all, while, at worst, other critics label Wharton an anti-Semite. Cynthia Ozick writes that Edith Wharton was compliant in the face of her friend Paul Bourget's openly-declared anti-Semitism (293). Sol Liptzin's in American Literature cites Wharton's caricature of the bounder Jew as an example of her anti-Semitism (154); Wharton's name also appears as evidence of a general cultural anti-Semitism in Florence Kiper Frank's 1930 Bookman essay, The Presentment of the in American Fiction (274; see Dobkowski 177-80). At best, Wharton is considered a social critic with her own ideological blindspots, racism and anti-Semitism among them. (She condemns Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, along with all nigger society in Harlem, in an April 1, 1927 letter to Gaillard Lapsley.)

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If is one thing contemporary observers of American literary studies agree upon, it is New must finally be transcended. William Cain, for example, protests New Critics' identification of with close reading of classic literary texts. It is not 'close reading' is itself misconceived, he argues, rather case for it has always been made at expense of other important things. Because New Critics won their case so convincingly, these other things have long been excluded from literary establishment. A list of costs resulting from institutionalization of New in 1950s, according to Cain, would include the rejection of other methods and other kinds of texts; misguided attempt to define (and thus defend) teaching of literature as, above all, 'close reading'; skepticism shown towards literary theory; and refusal to see other disciplines as having relevance for 'literary' criticism (New Criticism 1111-12). Criticism, in short, has become formalistic, to use an old critical buzz-word. Even deconstruction, as Cain correctly observes, is more an intensified continuation of tradition of formalistic close reading than a new, expansive kind of Fortunately, says Cain, there have been signs in recent years New Critical reign is at last coming to an end. The most important of these signs is the revival of 'history' as an instrument for criticism. This revival is result of work of certain critics and theorists-Cain mentions Foucault, Said, and Jameson-who have shown that 'history' does not have to imply-as it did for scholars New Critics attacked in 1930s-a narrow and naive review of sources, backgrounds, and influences. Rather, history now means the formation of an archive, building up of a rich, detailed, and complex discursive field. The ground for criticism, from this point of view, is not classic literary text, but inter-textual configurations and arrangements; 'criticism' thus entails study of power, political uses of language, and orders of discourse (New Criticism 1116-17). This reconstitution of ground for will produce, presumably, an analogous transformation of practice of close reading and expand domain of to include methods, texts, and disciplines suppressed by New Criticism. These developments, needless to say, win Cain's seal of approval.

Most Freshman English programs conceive of themselves as providing some form of introduction to university level discourse. The expectation is that students will leave English I (or whatever its designation) with the requisite reading and writing skills to enter a new discourse community, the world of the academy. Just what that means, however, is invariably in contention. Even within our own discipline, the acts of reading and writing have become the subject of much controversy. A recent review in College English gives some indication of one of the current divisions within the profession about exactly what we teach people when we teach them to read: Despite the recent wrangle and heated debates among the various camps of literary criticism, there are quite a few of us-most,

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.

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Books on literary theory and criticism by Cain, Â Eagleton, and Lentricchia Kenneth Johnston The Other Tongue, ed. Braj B. Kachru Alan C. Purves The Leaning Tower of Babel, by Richard Mitchell Richard F. Gregory

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