ABSTRACT
One day as your class is discussing Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (2009), you see a paperback book being passed between two young women seated near the windows. Better a book, you think, than some inflammatory note or, worse yet, something illegal. But you’re further intrigued-almost distracted as you struggle to keep the thread of the Hawthorne discussion alive. Why are these two students passing a book? It’s been clear from their lack of engagement in today’s-or any day’s-discussion of The Scarlet Letter that they haven’t read one page of the book. Nor were they much interested in Beowulf earlier in the month.
