Learning to Enjoy Literature

Students will not become enthusiastic readers of literature from a teacher simply assigning reading tasks and assessing the completion of the tasks, especially when the assessment takes the form of threatened quizzes. Instead, as this book shows, teachers have an obligation to reveal to learners the procedures that skilled readers follow as they work with and enjoy literature and a further obligation to help learners to recognize some value in tackling complex works of 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., 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?

Thomas M. McCann is a professor of English at Northern Illinois University, where he contributes to the teacher licensure program. His books include Transforming Talk into Text, Raise Your Voices: Inquiry, Discussion, and Literacy Learning (Rowman & Littlefield), and Teaching on Solid Ground, with John V. Knapp. John V. Knapp is emeritus Professor of English at Northern Illinois University, and, continuing since 2007, has served as the editor of the literary journal, Style. Knapp is the author and/or editor of several other books, including Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism ; Learning from Scant Beginnings: English Professor Expertise; and Editor, Critical Insights: Family.