ABSTRACT
Dialogic Literary Argumentation explicitly holds that the reading of and social interactions around literature are keys to understanding the human condition and the social, cultural, and political conditions of people’s lives. Metaphorically, the literary text(s) is a prop to foster dialogue that brings together multiple texts and engages people in dialogues and conversations about the human condition both in particular situations and beyond. The framework and model of Dialogic Literary Argumentation evolved from the collaborations with teachers and our long-term ethnographic field work in classrooms. The chapter discusses the major literary theories that have been taken up in secondary schools and describes trends in the teaching of literature in secondary schools. Reader-oriented developments in literary theory brought into question many of the premises of the New Criticism. As S. Mailloux has argued, reader-oriented critics focus on readers in the act of reading. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
