To build on the legacy of reader-response theory, English studies needs to destabilize the foundational binary separation of reading and writing by creating stronger intradisciplinary relations between composition and literary studies. English studies professors can do so by foregrounding the hybridity and performativity of the texts they teach and study.

This article examines a series of popular books about how to read that appeared in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It critiques these books for placing acts of reading into an impossibly utopian time, for imagining readers as translucently susceptible to instruction in reading, and for imagining reading as pure. As an antidote to this decade of advice, the article argues for (and demonstrates) an “impure” reading of visual-material texts that demand a reader's tactile engagement and self-aware participation in time.

Drawing on the notion that revision involves the performance of a writer’s identity in a conversation with herself, this article argues for conceptualizing revision as ecstasis and ventriloquism. By using the metaphor of ventriloquism to translate theory into heuristics for teaching revision, it enacts an underlying argument that pedagogy is metaphor. In doing so, it offers four practical strategies for teaching students to revise.