Peter J. Rabinowitz

Since I have yet to exorcise the demons of my invisible audiences, I'm flattered that William C. Dowling still feels I'm on the side of the angels. Alas, much of our disagreement arises, paradoxically, because he er-roneously thinks we're trying to dance on the head of the ...

The Discovery Novel When Cynthia Grenier asked William Faulkner if he read detective stories, he replied, "Well, I like a good one like Brothers Karamazov."1 Typical Faulkner irony, intended to deflect the question ? Probably. Yet Faulkner's quips are often ...

Actually, I've already raised some ethical issues by giving this essay a provocative but misleading title. »Pauline RØage's«1 pornographic classic The Story of O, written in 1954, is infamous as the story of a young fashion photographer who is brought by her lover to a chateau ; while ...

Classification is an occupational hazard for any theorist of detec­ tive stories—in part because there are so many convenient but competing axes for sorting them out. You can, for instance, differ­ entiate novels according to the location of the guilt they uncover— say, between Hercule Poirot stories (where detective and criminal are kept rigorously separate) and Oedipal stories (where, as in William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust or Raymond Chandler's The

Narratology of the moment is a branch of narrative theory that studies the affective power of particular moments in a narrative, viewed apart from their function in the whole, particularly apart from their role in the narrative’s temporal sequence. Adding the category of “flavor” to the standard narratological categories of “voice” and “focalization,” narratology of the moment slows down the reading process to explore the ways that a variety of features (for instance, momentary stylistic fireworks, particular cognitive configurations, or complex games with time and memory) can give individual moments a special frisson far in excess of their role in the larger work. Among other things, narratology of the moment seeks to explain why readers often return to particular passages in the works that they love.

Given how vividly Alan Palmer's essay describes our experiences as co-authors--and given how we found ourselves "of one mind" in our appreciation of it--we couldn't resist co-authoring a response. What strikes us most is the scope of its application. The social mind is, on one level, a simple concept. But it's a bold one that promotes a cognitive shift in our literary understanding; and once you've taken the leap, the concept provides illumination along many axes well beyond the practice of co-authorship. Granted, Palmer sometimes pushes universality further than we would. He says, for instance, "the concept of action necessarily requires the presence of thought." Yet there are cases--Nawal El Saadawi's God Dies by the Nile is rich in examples--where characters' needs are so fundamental that their actions seem detached from thought. Still, Palmer's contributions to our understanding outweigh any quarrels. We'd like to touch briefly on four ways in which we've found him revelatory: he proposes a vocabulary for talking more precisely about things that readers know but don't know that they know (familiar but unarticulated reading strategies); he provides a framework for reexamining assumptions about how people develop as readers (one that has led us in a surprising direction); he offers a source of new interpretive insights; and be gives us a way to frame new questions. Escaping the Cat: What We All Know Talking to students after reading Palmer clarified our appreciation of just how early readers learn fundamental interpretive practices--and what practices they learn. Corinne read Palmer's article while studying Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh with her sixth-graders at St. Gregory School. She uses the novel to teach basic concepts (plot, conflict/resolution, narration, character, setting, etc), and encourages the development of close reading strategies by asking her students to become "Reading Detectives." In particular, they were looking for clues to develop expectations about how the main conflict (Mrs. Frisby, a field mouse with a bedridden son, must move before the farmer plows through her home) might be resolved. Corinne expected her students to generate examples of clues by applying what Peter calls Rules of Notice in Before Reading--by looking, for instance, at privileged positions, repetitions, and unusual behaviors. These clues would serve as raw material to which students would apply strategies of signification, configuration, and coherence. Surprisingly, though, once past the dead-giveaway, privileged-position clues ("C'mon Ms. Bancroft, the Rats of Nimh are in the title--of course they'll help!"), students looked elsewhere in a way that confirms Palmer's claim that a cognitive approach is fundamental to reading: the most common clues they uncovered were in the minds of the characters. In other words, her sixth-graders, untrained in many standard interpretive techniques, demonstrated well-honed Theory of Mind skills: they were keenly aware of the relationship between a character's actions and his/her state of mind. In an important turning point of the story, the owl (whose species, as any sixth grader will tell you, eats mice) is expectedly reluctant to help Mrs. Frisby; but his attitude miraculously changes when he learns that Mrs. Frisby is Jonathan Frisby's widow. In fact, as Corinne's students eagerly pointed out--making the jump from ToM to Social Mind Theory--everyone's actions change when they learn about Mrs. Frisby's husband. "Don't you think it's strange, Ms. Bancroft, that everyone knows about Jonathan's connection to the rats--except his own wife!" Here, a group of sixth graders excitedly pointed to a collective knowledge among the farm animals, one from which Mrs. Frisby is completely excluded. This exclusion is a bigger, more revealing, and more sophisticated clue than the more basic ones Corinne expected her students to uncover. Thus, while Corinne has to reinforce many fundamental reading strategies, she doesn't need to teach ToM. …

"Maybe it's not really New Criticism; maybe it's just called that because it's not anything else." --Emily Rohrbach Introduction: The Aims of Education We have written this essay with some trepidation. The project began when John V. Knapp invited Peter to revisit some of the arguments he had made about the role of literary theory in secondary education in Authorizing Readers, which he had co-authored with Michael W. Smith back in 1998. Peter was wary: did he have anything new to add, especially after the introduction of the Common Core and its bright vision of a revamped educational system? But he was also intrigued: he'd been working, at a distance, with Corinne, a former student, as she tried to adapt her theoretical knowledge to the day-to-day activities in her middle- school classroom. We wondered: working together, might we in fact be able to think in new ways about how students, both secondary and early college levels, learn--or should be taught--to read literature? Perhaps: but Peter is a college teacher, with a few months of high-school teaching during Freedom Summer, and Corinne has taught for three years in an independent school. What could we really contribute to a national debate dominated by people with far more knowledge and experience than both of us together? Still, neither of us is exactly diffident, and we figured we'd barge ahead. Offering what? Let us begin with a few caveats. We're not going to be proposing a model curriculum, nor a pedagogical guide. Nor will we be intervening in the debates about literary reading lists--for instance about the role of young adult literature in classrooms. What we're hoping to do, rather, is offer a few general ideas about how literary education might be more profitably grounded (as you'll see when we get to the issue of abstraction, there's something paradoxical in that generality); and our arguments will be utopian in the specific sense that we'll skip over such questions as how someone might go about putting some of our ideas into practice in a particular classroom. While we'll be offering some specific interpretations, too, our goal is not to convince you of our readings and evaluations (say, of Hunger Games), but to convince you that we're offering fertile grounds on which to discuss them. Simply put, we argue that if education doesn't give students the tools to discuss important literary questions (including questions about literature's relationship to the larger world) intelligently, then their education is flawed. Our basic aim is hardly controversial: to develop students who can be flexible, self-conscious readers. (1) We also want them to be theoretically informed. This might seem a bit more treacherous, since teaching theory to high school students may, at first, raise the specter of replacing Hawthorne with Derrida in our schools. Nothing could be further from our minds. Over the past thirty or forty years (can it really have been that long?), the word "theory" has been hijacked--at least at the college and university level--by post-structuralists and post-modernists (loosely considered) so that it has come more and more to mean a particular kind (or at least a cluster of particular kinds) of theory. (2) We are not interested in giving our students High Theory, either directly or indirectly (for an interesting discussion, see Mohanty "Radical"). Our notion of theory is less grand, and certainly less overtly ideological. We're not proposing something rigorously systematic; what we're looking for is a set of comprehensible, pragmatic, and coherent principles about literature, readers, and the act of reading, principles on which readers can rely as they build literary interpretations. Theory in this sense need not be threatening, even in a middle-school classroom. In fact, theory in our sense is, to a large extent, working with what our students already know--providing a framework and a vocabulary that allow them to express and build on that knowledge. …

We are flattered by the responses we've received to "Euclid at the Core"--by the resonances our article has found even with people who do not share our basic starting points, by the way our colleagues (some long-time friends, others we've never met) have amplified and refined and questioned our ideas, and by the insightful pedagogical suggestions that, in Sheridan Blau's words, "extend the reach" of our initial essay. We don't have space, unfortunately, to honor everything that's been said in these eleven brief but rich essays. We'd therefore like to focus on two areas. First, we'll address three stubborn and significant challenges to our argument. These issues interlock in many ways, but we'll try to separate them for clarity's sake. Then, we'll turn to some practical consequences we did not have space to address in our initial article. "Our Warranted Quarrel": Challenges 1. "To Find the Heart's Construc...

Since I have yet to exorcise the demons of my invisible audiences, I'm flattered that William C. Dowling still feels I'm on the side of the angels. Alas, much of our disagreement arises, paradoxically, because he er-roneously thinks we're trying to dance on the head of the ...

Arnold Weinstein's The Fiction of Relationship is a wide-ranging and deliberately icono-clastic book with two primary goals. The first is philosophical, or perhaps moral. Weinstein believes that "the individualist code" needs to be contested by the recogni-tion "that the self is part ...