The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the condition of our democracy and the author argues for more public discourse--in classrooms, newspapers, magazines, etc. to reclaim a public voice on national artistic matters. In this revealing study of the links among literature, rhetoric, and democracy, Rosa A. Eberly explores the public debate generated by amateur and professional readers about four controversial literary works: two that were censored in the United States and two that created conflict because they were not censored. In Citizen Critics Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psychoand Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity. By asserting their authority to pass judgments--thus denying the authority of citizen critics--these professionals effectively removed the discussion from literary public spheres. A passionate advocate for treating reading as a public and rhetorical enterprise rather than solely as a private one, Eberly suggests the potential impact a work of literature may have on the social polity if it is brought into public forums for debate rather than removed to the exclusive rooms of literary criticism. Eberly urges educators to use their classrooms as protopublic spaces in which students can learn to make the transition from private reader to public citizen.

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question, should teachers bring their politics into the classroom, is a question that is vague and, in the final analysis, only useful as a scare-tactic. It may sound straightforward, but it quickly dissolves into a variety of more specific possible interpretations: Should a teacher insist that students adopt in their writing a particular political position under threat of failure; should a teacher encourage students to adopt a particular political position; should a teacher argue for a particular political position in class; should a teacher expose students to political positions that are contrary to those the students already hold; should a teacher encourage or permit students to express any and all of their beliefs and opinions, even those that other students might find offensive; should a teacher show students how to critically examine beliefs, political or otherwise, and ask students to critically examine their own beliefs; should a teacher raise the possibility that the beliefs we have come to hold are interconnected and symbolically charged in ways that may prevent us from straightforwardly examining them; should a teacher design assignments around controversial political issues and insist that students engage (e.g., argue with others and defend their own position); should a teacher avoid all references to specific political issues and train students to write clear, grammatically correct prose? And, of course, there are many other ways of hearing the question. If we are to resist the question, should teachers bring their politics into the classroom, then, in favor of a question or questions that bring out more clearly what is at stake for us in the discussion of politics in the classroom, we may want to begin with a closer examination of the relationship between educational and political aims-which is precisely the direction we seem to be going in, if articles such as Patricia Bizzell's The of Virtue, Richard Marius's Politics in the Classroom, Louise Wetherbee Phelps', A Constrained Vision of the Writing Classroom, Donald Lazere's Teaching