ABSTRACT
Literature can play a central role in students’ intellectual, social, and personal development. In this chapter, I describe ways in which literary imagination provokes us to explore options, solve problems, and understand others-to engage in social activity with literary, imagined, and real situations. As such, it calls us to rethink the contribution literature can make to intelligent and humane thinking as well as the need to nurture students’ literary experiences in the development of thoughtful literacy, not only in literature course work, but across the curriculum. Since 1987, through my work funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, I have been working toward a readerbased theory for the teaching of literature. My goal has been to understand what it means to make sense of literature from a reader’s point of view, ways in which it can support a community of engaged and highly literate readers, and what that means for refocusing instructional goals and practice. (See Langer, 1995, for the most complete discussion of this work, some of which I call on in this chapter.) In the first part of this chapter, I describe what I have learned from my studies about the web of sense-making underlying literary understanding. I then discuss how it can support the conception of literacy as a social activity, and thereby affect our notions of literate engagement, generativity, and instruction.
