ABSTRACT
I vividly remember several years ago a student, trembling with frustration, standing before me at the end of a class near the beginning of the year, clutching her notebook with pencil poised, and asking intensely: “What was the reason Sammy quit?” after we had discussed multiple possibilities for Sammy, in John Updike’s “A & P,” quitting hisjob. Breaking such student expectations for definitive answers to problematic situations in literary texts is not easy, even with a reader-response approach to teaching literature.
