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.

In her influential 1988 essay, “Fighting Words,” Jane Tompkins argued that the arguments typically made by literary critics are characterized by an aggressive competitiveness that amounts to violence. But, as Tompkins’s own rhetorical strategies demonstrate, at least as deplorable are the practices whereby critics render certain people anonymous.