ABSTRACT
The overarching question of this chapter is whether it is possible for faculty in a variety of disciplines and at different educational levels to encourage students to read, to provide opportunities for them to take pleasure in their acts of reading, and simultaneously to encourage them to want to read in increasingly complex and critically intensive ways. One possible set of strategies we can use to help students achieve both pleasure and increasingly critical abilities is to enable them to activate some of their street knowledge, which is often checked at the classroom door-including their habituated ways of reading popular culture, for critical ends. I will suggest that teaching students to read written texts “symptomatically” from historical and cultural perspectives can lead to both pleasure and an advance in their critical reading abilities.
