Learning to Enjoy Literature

Learning to Enjoy Literature is a welcome aid to high school teachers seeking to teach literature in ways that will grant their students greater independence and motivate them to engage texts, ideas, and issues. McCann and Knapp model pedagogical approaches that encourage students to arrive at their own informed understandings rather than recite the teacher’s interpretation. Their book offers teachers productive approaches to treating textual interpretation not as an effort to reach a single right view or answer, but rather as a collaborative activity involving lively discussion of texts drawn from a variety of media.

-- Gary Weissman, author of The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature

With Learning to Enjoy Literature, Tom McCann and John V. Knapp do English teachers and their students a very great service. The authors have created an eminently readable text that deftly combines a thorough survey of pedagogic literature with a wide range of lively, original, and concrete suggestions. I cannot recall a book about teaching so absolutely committed to reaching students and finding ways to engage them and so convinced that students desire this as much as teachers do. And who would have thought that you could introduce a class to irony with a George Grosz cartoon or a New Yorker cover?

-- Helaine L. Smith, author of Masterpieces of Classic Greek Drama, Homer and the Homeric Hymns, and Teaching Particu