ABSTRACT
“What story are you reading anyway?” My teaching colleague flung that remark at me in the heat of a discussion of John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums.” The class of seniors and graduate students laughed, as did she, the tone of the class being relaxed as well as honest. However, despite the humor of the retort to something that I had said, it expressed emphatically the disparity between our interpretations.
