ENTERING INTO LITERARY COMMUNION: REIMAGINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN READERS AND TEXTS IN THE SECONDARY LITERATURE CURRICULUM  By  Kati S. Macaluso               A DISSERTATION  Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for the degree of   Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher EducationÑDoctor of Philosophy  2016            ABSTRACT  ENTERING INTO LITERARY COMMUNION: REIMAGINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN READERS AND TEXTS IN THE SECONDARY LITERATURE CURRICULUM   By  Kati S. Macaluso   Throughout the history of English Language Arts education, educators have relied on literature as a tool for the cultivation of knowledge:  cultural knowledge, moral and critical knowledge, and knowledge of skills and strategies.  The English Language Arts curriculumÕs increasingly technocratic agenda (Brandt, 2015; Brass, 2014) has resulted not only in the marginalization of literature, but also in the increased instrumentalization of literatureÑthe increased ÒtoolingÓ of literature toward rational ends.  Rather than focusing on literatureÕs Òends,Ó and asking what kinds of knowledge literature might help to facilitate, this project focuses on and takes as its starting point the relationships that comprise the literature curriculum, namely the relationships between readers and texts.  By applying a Ranci‘rian lens of equality to literatureÕs more traditional curricular frameworks, I make visible how and when these frameworks perpetuate inequality between readers and texts.  Then, using Ranci‘rian equality, along with my own and othersÕ lived experience of reading literature, I imagine a kind of event not accounted for in literatureÕs more rational-instrumental frames: literary communion.    I conceive of literary communion as more sacramental than rational-instrumental, evoking a sense of spiritual transcendence, transubstantiation, and giftedness.  In my quest to unpack these sacramental dimensions of literary communion, I elaborate their implications for longstanding pedagogical and curricular traditions of close reading, reader response, and emancipation.  I conclude by acknowledging that openness to literary communion in the English Language Arts curriculum is, in many ways, a departure from certainty and control.  In keeping with the sacramental connotations of communion as well as the spirit of Òas ifÓ undergirding Ranci‘rian equality, literary communion might reframe the teaching of literature as a matter of faith.        Copyright by KATI S. MACALUSO 2016                              !"!                    For Mike, my better half.  Your emptying of self, for the sake of our marriage, our family, and our faith, is a model of communion to us all.   And for my children, Matthew, Michael, and Grace.  You have gifted these days of writing with laughter and love, and so I leave you with this: May you grow to realize all that literature and language makes possible, and that all things in lifeÑregardless of what the world may tell youÑcome down to faith.                     !"#!ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS     I wish to acknowledge the teachers in this studyÑnot only Margie, Dan, Lisa, and India, whose stories of reading appear in the pages that followÑbut also the countless other teachers IÕve learned from throughout my life as a reader: classroom teachers, my parents, professional writers. This dissertation would not have been possible had it not been for their witness and words.  Their role in this project is a reminder of the important work of teachers everywhere: to give us the courage to imagine how things might be otherwise.    I also wish to acknowledge my committee members at Michigan State University: Dr. Kyle Greenwalt, Dr. Janine Certo, Dr. Mary Juzwik, and Dr. Lynn Fendler.  Their expertise as phenomenologists, poets, English Educators, and philosophers converged to give life to this project, and their openness to Humanities-based research gave me the courage to Òlet go and be literary.Ó I am especially grateful to Lynn, my greatest sounding board as I tried to put words to this project.  I will miss our conversations and the close proximity of a colleague who always seemed to know what I needed before I did, but who gave me the time and space to discover it for myself.     I wish to acknowledge my fellow graduate students and colleagues.  Cori McKenzie, Natasha Perez, Don McClure and Amanda Smith have been with me since Year 1, assuring me I wasnÕt alone in my Ph.D. endeavors.  Dr. Christine Dawson blazed a trail for me, finishing her degree right at the time I was beginning my ownÑalways making time to mentor me and renew our friendship at annual conferences throughout the year.      And finally, I wish to acknowledge my family and friends.  My parents, Susan and Richard Duffey, were the pillars of support all children hope for, meeting me all over the country !"##!to watch my children during conferences and comprehensive exams, and never asking for anything in return.   My husband, Mike, was my constant companion, shifting gears from graduate student to father with a seamlessness that enabled us to complete our degrees in the five years we had allotted.  I know he joins me in acknowledging and thanking God for our children, Matthew, Michael, and Grace, who were our greatest source of laughter and perspective these past five years.                                     !"###!TABLE OF CONTENTS     LIST OF FIGURES          x    CHAPTER 1           1 BREAKING BEYOND LITERARY INSTRUMENTALISM    1 The Echoes that Still Spin          1  Defining Literature          4  Why Attend to the Ethics of Literary Reading?     5   The marginalization of literature in a knowledge economy   6   The instrumentalization of literary reading     8       Literature as tool for developing cultural knowledge and morals 8                         Literature as tool for reading the world    10       Literature as tool for declarative and procedural knowledge  11       Literature as tool for mastering skill and rehearsing strategy  12       Literature as tool for understanding form    13   Formalism as a Conglomeration of Skill, Strategy and Form     15   The Ethical Implications of Rational-Instrumental Approaches to Literature  16   Imagining Otherwise: Toward a Communion of Reader and Text  20     Another echo         20   Communion with Literature        25   Overview of Chapters         28   CHAPTER 2           31 ÒPOEM-INGÓ RANCIéRE:  CONSTRUCTING MY THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND MY METHOD/OLOGY         31  Introducing Ranci‘re         31  On Òthe Universe Conspiring:Ó  Reading Ranci‘re While Writing Poetry  33  Key Concepts in Ranci‘rian Philosophy      36   Ranci‘rian equality         36   Ranci‘rian aesthetics and its implications for literature    38   Ranci‘rian emancipation        40  An Elucidation of my Method/ology       42   Delving into lived accounts of literary reading     42   The interviews          43   Data analysis          45  What it has Meant to ÒPoemÓ Throughout this Project    47   Reducing: Writing as linguistic thickness      48   Concretizing: Using anecdotes       50   Evoking          51  CHAPTER 3           53 ENTERING INTO COMMUNION: REIMAGINING LITERATURE THROUGH A LENS  !#$!OF EQUALITY          53  Introduction          53  RosenblattÕs Reconfiguration of Reader-Text Relationships    55  English EducatorsÕ Translation of RosenblattÕs Theory: Inequality Perpetuated 58  Ranci‘reÕs Invitation to Reimagine Aesthetics with Equality   62  A Literature Without Hierarchies       65   Distinguishing between representation and aesthetics    65   Imagining literature as a verification of equality between reader and text  68    Treating literature as defying explanation     68    Imagining literature as being premised upon a community of equals 71  Redefining Close Reading: The Inextricability of Aesthetics and Formalism 72  From Aesthetic Transaction to Literary Communion     77  CHAPTER 4           81 TRANSUBSTANTIATIONS: WHEN WORDS BECOME FLESH   81  Introduction          81  The Fleshiness of Words         82  (Non)Emancipatory Frameworks for Literary Reading    86   Hierarchy #1: Expert mediation       86   Hierarchy #2: The superiority of rationalism      89  What These Hierarchies Mean for Critical Curricular Frameworks  90  Reimagining the Emancipatory Potential of Literary Reading   91   The ÒPhilosopher-QueenÓ: Introducing Margie     93   Reading Equus         94  From Emancipation to Transubstantiation        99  CHAPTER 5           105 THANKSGIVINGS          105  A Final Echo          105  Literary Reading as Gifting        107   Reflecting back         109  Literary Communion as Risk-Taking       112  A Matter of Faith         115   Listening for the music         118   Embracing the absence of words       119   Allowing literature to beget literature       119  Giving Thanks           120  REFERENCES           123       !$!LIST OF FIGURES    Figure 1. A visual of the hierarchical flow of knowledge in the literature curriculum 20  Figure 2.  A visual of literary communion       28  Figure 3.  A visual of the reader-text relationships implied in RosenblattÕs transaction 57!%!CHAPTER 1 BREAKING BEYOND LITERARY INSTRUMENTALISM   Sitting over words Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing Not far Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark The echo of everything that has ever Been spoken Still spinning its one syllable Between the earth and silence. (Merwin, 1996, p.198) The Echoes that Still Spin How often I have thought of this Merwin poem in the hours, days, weeks, and months of composing this dissertation.  I have felt, in the many evenings and early mornings of writing, what it is to Òsit over words/Very late.Ó And, in the gifts of silence those hours afford, I have heard Òa kind of whispered sighing,Ó Òthe echo of everythingÓ that has come before these pages Òstill spinning.Ó  Spinning can evoke any number of meanings: It can, for example, refer to the action of rotating or whirling about, as in a spinning top.  Journalists might modify, or spin their stories to sway public opinion.  Our heads might spin at the announcement of shocking news.  As I settle into my chair to begin another day of writing these pages, I cannot help but consider yet another derivative of spinning: homespun. Meaning Òwoven in the home,Ó the term captures both a connotation of made-ness and a humble place of origin, and it occurs to me that these pages are !&!themselves an exercise in making, with a home in many of the texts that, in the busyness of this past year, have come to line the stairs of my home. These texts, whose shadowy contours I can barely make out in the late evenings and early mornings of writing, are the contrails of both a year and a lifetime of reading.  ChildrenÕs booksÑmany of them my own from childhoodÑcoalesce with Billy CollinsÕs latest poetry anthology that I turn to for inspiration when the more desiccated prose of academic writing creeps into my soul.  On another stair sits a smattering of titles by the French philosopher Jacques Ranci‘re, who has become for me a kind of conversational companion throughout this project.  Kevin HenkesÕs WaitingÑthe latest in my childrenÕs collection of favoritesÑsits on the landing closest to their bedroom.  Seeing it, I wonder if my sons will one day hear its echoes in the same way I still hear the echoes of my fatherÕs voice reading Where the Red Fern Grows or To Kill a Mockingbird at the end of a long day.    My eyes wander toward a stack of English methods textbooks, and I am overcome with memories of my former English Language Arts studentsÑall ten yearsÕ worth. I wonder what, if any, echoes of our literature curriculum they may still hear, or see, or feel.  I wonder if my first class of high school students from Donaldsonville, Louisiana, still owns the bright red shirts they made to memorialize our unit on American Romanticism, LongfellowÕs verse ÒBe not like dumb driven cattleÓ stamped across the front. In the darkness of these quiet and motionless hours, I recall Huck FinnÕs nighttime observations along the silvery, silent Mississippi: ÒIt smelled late.Ó And I wonder what tastes and smells from literature still live with my students, what incense still wafts through the air they breathe.   From the echoes of many of the literary, philosophical, and teacher education texts that line my stairs, from the echoes of my own and othersÕ lived accounts of reading literatureÑand !'!even from my own spiritualityÑI have spun this dissertation.  I might argue that this dissertation is proof of the made-ness of reading, or of the creativity of reader, andÑas suchÑa testament to reader and text as creative equals.  I raise this point because equalityÑan ethical lens I borrow from French philosopher Jacques Ranci‘reÑwill be the unifying lens of the pages that follow. The pages that follow are dedicated to one of the three domains of the secondary English Language Arts curriculum: readingÑspecifically the reading of literature.  I write them in an educational climate that, while still conducive to literary texts lining peopleÕs stairs, is not as conducive to literary texts lining studentsÕ backpacks.  I write them in an educational climate concerned with what readers can extract from literature and what literature can allow readers to know.  Believing, from experience, that reading literature can be about more than extracting and knowing, I choose, in the pages that follow, to be faithful not to the rational-instrumentalism pervading the curricular conversations surrounding literature.  I choose instead to focus on the relationships between readers and literary textsÑrelationships that, in more rational-instrumental curricular frameworks, have tended to keep the text in a position removed from and superior to the reader.  I choose to consider how faithfulness to equality between reader and text might allow English educators to imagine a version of literary reading perhaps more sacramental than instrumental.  This version of literary reading is one that I call literary communion.   My discussion of literary communion is intended to show how relationships between readers and texts that perpetuate inequality might be otherwise, and to elaborate the possibilities for the English Language Arts literature curriculum afforded by an ethical frameworkÑone grounded in equality.  Much like Ranci‘reÕs philosophical project intent on imagining what might be possible in beginning from an assumption of equality, my own project is one of imagining.  My goal in the pages that follow, then, is not to prove that literary communion is, but !(!to reconfigure the assumptions that ground the secondary literature curriculum and to imagine literary communion as that which might be possible when literature is approached from an ethical commitment to equality between readers and texts.    Defining Literature Before proceeding, I wish to clarify a few terms, beginning with the term Òliterature.Ó B.A. HinsdaleÕs (1896) tripartite division of the English Language Arts into speech, composition, and reading participated in making literature one of the three primary domains1 of the upper-middle and secondary English Language Arts curriculum.  However, as Rosenblatt (1978/1994) pointed out in her own work on literary reading that has had long-lasting implications for English Language Arts education, the term ÒliteratureÓ is notoriously fluid.  While it is sometimes used to refer to a language art of narrative, poetic, or dramatic quality, it is more often than not used to refer to any printed matter, or to writing considered to be of high quality.  My own use of the term literature refers to a language art of narrative, poetic, or dramatic quality, but it also bears some connection to the work of Canadian scholar and English educator John Willinsky (1991) who, interested in literatureÕs connections with literacy, defined literature as a networked Òactivity as well as artifactÓ (p.4).   For me, literature as artifact, is what I will often refer to throughout this project as the literary textÑthe textual work of art most likely composed in a narrative, poetic, or dramatic mode. A great many of the ethical arguments for literature that have arisen of late in response to the age of scientific measurement and accountability (e.g., Alsup, 2015) have tended to equate literature with literary fiction.  However, my own interest in literary communion is one that applies to the reading of both fictional and nonfictional narrative, poetic, and dramatic texts. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!%!The centrality of literature, even at the upper middle and secondary levels of the English language arts, !)!The literary text, though, is only one piece, or player, in the broader notion of literature as networked activity.  While there may be innumerable players that comprise literature as networked activity, I limit that network, in my own project, to the relationships among readers (both students and teachers), writers, and texts.  As will become clear in the chapters that follow, I have chosen for this project to focus primarily on the equality between readers and texts, keeping in mind that the equality between readers and texts has implications for the relationships between teachers and students in English Language Arts classrooms, as well as for the relationships between writers and readers, writers and texts. Why Attend to the Ethics of Literary Reading?             I will say more in later chapters about what I mean by equality and what attending to equality might make possible for literary reading in the English Language Arts curriculum.  Before launching into that line of argumentation, however, I wish to provide some context for why attending to the ethics of literary readingÑthe relations between people and literatureÑmatters in mainstream US English Language Arts education. I will do so by inquiring into the ethical implications of a trend in US literacy educationÑone that literacy studies scholar Deborah Brandt (2015) has identified as the ascendance of more technocratic values rooted in a knowledge economy.  These values, I argue, coincide with the marginalization of literature in secondary US curricula, and what I perceive as the instrumentalization of literature as sponsored by the secondary US curriculum.    Viewing these trends through the lens of Jacques Ranci‘reÕs equalityÑan ethical framework that readers will soon discover to be of central importance to my projectÑreveals their rootedness in relationships of assumed inequality between readers and texts.  Equality, for Ranci‘re, functions not only as a lens through which to critique hierarchical arrangements.  It is !*!also a launching-off point from which to begin to imagine how things might be otherwise.  So, in my own project, equality serves as a way of analyzing literatureÕs existing curricular frameworks, as well as a means by which to imagine how literature might be open to relationships between readers and texts that look and feel different from those sponsored by the literature curriculumÕs more rational-instrumental frameworks.  Literary communionÑone such possible reconfiguration of the relationship between readers and textsÑwill be the focus of subsequent chapters. For now, though, I shed light on the current context of the literature curriculum in English Language Arts education to illuminate why the chapters that follow might be worth reading at all.  The marginalization of literature in a knowledge economy The knowledge economy, as Brandt (2015) defines it, refers to the economy first identified by Fritz Machlup (1972) as that rooted more in the manufacturing of ideas, data, information, and news than in the manufacturing of material things.  This rise of a knowledge economy has been accompanied by shifts in the ways people make sense of the worth of various kinds of literacies.  Literacies that can be leveraged as toolsÑor instruments-- for the manufacturing of knowledge, ideas, and information assume a greater value, and a more privileged place in the U.S. school curriculum.   Alsup (2015) has argued that the rise of a knowledge economy, along with an increasing obsession with scientific measurement, has resulted in the marginalization of literature.  With the advent of the Common Core State Standards in 2011, for example, came a new ratio of recommended Òtext types,Ó calling for a 30 percent emphasis on literary fiction and nonfiction, and a 70 percent emphasis on informational text that Common Core author David Coleman (2011) claims lends itself more efficiently to studentsÕ mastery of ideas.  And while some (e.g., !+!Wessling, 2011) have argued that such ratios refer to a distribution of reading students undertake across the curriculum, with English Language Arts holding these two types of reading in much greater balance, the increasing linkages between literacy and a knowledge economy do not bode well for literatureÕs place in the secondary English Language Arts curriculum.   BrandtÕs (2015) analysis of recent changes to literacy trends throughout the U.S. substantiates the arguments of scholars concerned with literatureÕs marginalized status. According to Brandt, reading was considered from the earliest days of the Republic indispensable to liberty and democratic citizenship, to the point where mass literacy was understood almost exclusively from a reading perspective.  But reading, it seems, has assumed a position subordinate to writing, which in this past decade has, for the first time, outpaced reading as a mass daily experience.  BrandtÕs observations about the status of reading in relation to writing is relevant to my own project concerned with literary reading, but more relevant perhaps is her analysis of why writing is outpacing reading for the first time in U.S. history:  writingÕs service to a knowledge economy.  Whereas reading carries with it a moral legacy that was used, in the context of American education, to socialize students into the value system of Protestant Christianity, writing Òhas always been for work, for production, for output earning, profit, publicity, practicality, record keeping, buying and sellingÓ (Brandt, 2009, p.164). BrandtÕs read of the economic sponsorship of writing illuminates what she refers to as writingÕs Òcommercial valueÓ: Ò[T]he way it can be transacted and enhance other transactions, the way it can fit into systems of work, wage, and market, all make writing unique among the so-called language artsÓ (Brandt, 2015, p.5).  In short, reading might be productive, but writing is a product, for it embodies the virtual ÒgoodsÓ of the knowledge economy: the manufacturing of ideas, information, etc.  BrandtÕs analysis of !,!the ascendance of writing, therefore, helps to illuminate both the technocratic agenda that governs literacy curricula in the United States as well as the ways that particular literacies find themselves adopting a more instrumental tenor in order to sustain themselves in the U.S. English Language Arts curriculum.     The instrumentalization of literary reading  This more instrumental tenor might seem evident in what Langer (2014) has described as a Òturning awayÓ (p.162) from literatureÕs centrality as source of moral and civic development in the U.S. English Language Arts curricula.  Throughout the history of the teaching of English, there have been a number of competing ÒtraditionsÓ (Applebee, 1974) in the English Language Arts curriculaÑeach carrying assumptions about the goals of literature and the way it should be taught. What Langer has described as a Òturning awayÓ from literatureÕs pivotal role in studentsÕ moral and civic development speaks in part to a kind of abatement of what Applebee might refer to as a Òcultural heritageÓ tradition, a tradition that played an important role in the 19th century in legitimizing the study of literature.  In what follows, I review what I see as three dominant traditions in the teaching of literatureÑthe cultural, the critical, and the skills-oriented. I contend that all three might be implicated in what I term the ÒinstrumentalizationÓ of literatureÑthe ÒtoolingÓ of literature toward pre-established endsÑwith what seems to be a resurgence of the skills-oriented tradition as the dominant currency of todayÕs knowledge economy.    Literature as tool for developing cultural knowledge and morals           Even the Òcultural heritageÓ tradition, which Langer (2014) has speculated is declining in an era of standardization and accountability obsessed with college and career readiness, has at times had a certain aura of instrumentalism about it. Literature, after all, was considered the most effective tool for intellectual enlightenment and moral conditioning.  Rick Beach, Amanda !-!Thein, and Allen Webb (2012) identify as one of English Language ArtsÕs four predominant curricular frameworks a Òshared cultural knowledge frameworkÓ that stresses this continued ÒtoolingÓ of literature in the name of civic readiness or participation. This framework, in keeping with the work of scholars who study the link between the English curriculum and cultural memory (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2013) and/or the role of literature in building the nation state (Choo, 2016), Òstresses the idea of the language arts as content or shared cultural knowledge essential for an understanding and appreciation of oneÕs heritage and participation in societyÓ (Beach et al., 2012, p.23).  Literature, in other words, is a tool for the sake of civic readiness and participation, with the assumption being that students need to know specific information about canonical authors and texts in order to be Òculturally literateÓ (Hirsch, 1987) enough for civic participation.    In addition to building a knowledge base considered necessary for civic participation, literature has been known for its usefulness in shaping moral character through the inculcation of values, virtues, etc. This use of literature for the sake of moral grooming is not entirely separate from the way literature has been used as tool for civic participation, given the ways literature has historically been used to socialize students into the value system of Protestant Christianity thought to impose order on an ever-changing demographic in a democratic U.S. society (Fraser,1999).   Language Arts educators have been known to capitalize on literatureÕs aesthetic dimensions to accomplish these simultaneously moral and civic-minded objectives.  BrassÕs (2010) historiographical research points to the ways educators and curriculum designers have conceived of literature, in particular, as offering a set of non-coercive conditions through which to develop the ÒrightÓ sorts of aims, values, and visions in readers.  LiteratureÕs Òmusical and imaginative products,Ó wrote 19th century English educator Percival Chubb, Òwould lodge more !%.!memorably and fatally in the hearts and minds of children more than anything elseÓ (qtd. in Brass, 2010, p.708).  In other words, literatureÕs aesthetic dimension afforded educators a subtle, but effective tool with which to shape the morality of studentsÕ hearts, minds, and souls. Though Chubb was writing in the early nineteenth century, even some of the most current arguments (e.g., Alsup, 2013; Malo-Juvera, 2014) in defense of literature as it continues to be relegated to informational reading and writing have highlighted the ways literature might serve as a powerful tool in the service of studentsÕ moral transformation.   Literature as tool for reading the world       Though still linking literature with moral and civic development, critical frameworks for the study of literature remain distinct from other curricular traditions given their explicit attention to ideology and politics.  Critical approaches to literature (e.g., Appleman, 2009; Tyson, 2011) have tended to treat literature as tool for reflecting on and affecting the diverse, political, and often troubled world that readers inhabit.  As Appleman (2009) argues in the opening paragraph of her second edition of Critical Encounters in High School English,  The charge for those of us who engage with adolescents through literacy, as Paolo Freire  (Freire & Macedo, 1987) has pointed out, is to help students read both the world and the word.  Our job is not simply to help students read and write; our job is to help them use the skills of writing and reading to understand the world around them. (p.2) In the critical tradition, then, reading literature matters for the sake of allowing readers the opportunity to engage with alternative ideologies, so that students may expand their interpretive choices, appreciate the power of multiple perspectives, and critique hegemonic power structures.   However, for critical literacy advocates, reading literature alone does not suffice in the accomplishment of these goals.  Rather, critical approaches to literature instruction call for the !%%!explicit instruction of contemporary literary theory to be used in conjunction with literary texts.   Wearing the lenses afforded by contemporary literary theory, readers are able to see and challenge gaps, silences, and inconsistencies within the authored text, while also becoming more aware of their own ideologies that might privilege particular personalized readings.  For the critical literacy advocate, then, literature, in the company of literary theory, is about more than reading the literary word.  LiteratureÕs function, in a critical curricular framework, is to serve as an instrument for reading the world.   Literature as tool for declarative and procedural knowledge   A third more explicitly instrumental tradition shaping the secondary literature curriculumÑand the tradition that has possibly outranked all others with the increasing pressure to ÒinstrumentalizeÓ literacy practices in service of a knowledge economyÑis one that has emphasized the development of essential language skills (Applebee, 1993).  The function of literature, it seems, is to resolve the problem that popular English methods textbook author Jim Burke (2013) identifies in the ever-popular English TeachersÕ Companion: Òthat high school and even a large percentage of college graduates are showing up for work without the skills and knowledge needed to compete in this economyÓ (p.2).    More recently implemented curricular documents like the Common Core State Standards have sought to correct this problem, not just requesting, but Òdemand[ing]Éthat the building of knowledge through reading play a fundamental roleÓ in a childÕs literacy education (Coleman, 2011, p.9, emphasis added).  The more technocratic discourses of the standardization and accountability movement, it seems, have tended to favor the treatment of readingÑincluding literary readingÑas tool for the acquisition of procedural and declarative knowledge, with !%&!literatureÕs political, moral, and aesthetic potential figuring less prominently of late in the English Language Arts curriculum (Brass, 2014).    Again, Beach et al.Õs (2012) sketch of the curricular topography of the English language arts is helpful in underscoring the ways literature has assumed what is largely a rational- instrumentalist ÒuseÓ value in the English Language Arts curricula.  Of the four predominant frameworks they identify as having historically shaped the English Language Arts curriculum, three link the English Language Arts curriculum explicitly to the acquisition of declarative and procedural knowledge. English Language Arts, they argue, has been dedicated to the acquisition of skills, the rehearsal of strategies, and knowledge of form.    Though Beach et al. elaborate the ways these curricular frameworks have governed the teaching of reading and writing in the English Language Arts, I pay close attention, in the sub-sections that follow, to the implications of each of these curricular frameworks for what it means to read literature.  My goal in doing so is to delineate what some of the leading scholars of English Education have conceived of as the historical distribution of the sensible (Ranci‘re, 2006)Ñthe seemingly sensible way things are and have beenÑin the literature curriculum in secondary English Language Arts education.   In doing so, I hope to make room to explore, in later chapters, what might be possible for literary reading beyond these current curricular configurations.  Literature as tool for mastering skill and rehearsing strategy             In what Beach et al. (2012) label skills- and strategies-based curricular frameworks for English Language Arts, reading Òis defined as a category consisting of an extensive set of  ÔsubskillsÕÑdecoding, word-attack, inference, etcÓ (p.22).  This framework is perhaps the one most promulgated by the authors of the Common Core State Standards who, in delineating the !%'!expectations for reading literature across Grades 9 through 12, equate literary reading with two primary skills: ÒanalysisÓ and Òdetermination of meaning.Ó   Within this framework, one of the guiding priorities for literary text selection is text complexity that, according to Common Core authors, can be measured through qualitative and quantitative assessment of Òlevels of meaning, structure, language conventionality and clarity, [and] knowledge demandsÓ (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2012, p.4).  And, while English Language Arts teachers with whom I have worked have defined text complexity in other ways, citing instances of students who find themselves grappling, for example, with the content of a literary work fraught with moral complexities, those indicants of text complexity are not as valued in a skills-oriented framework.  After all, they do not guarantee the creation of conditions for decoding, inferring, and interpreting.  The literary texts deemed valuable in a skills- or strategies-oriented curricular framework are those that are capable of serving as rehearsal grounds for a set of transferrable skills or strategies.    Literature as tool for understanding form            Much of the procedural knowledge foregrounded in a skills or strategies-oriented framework for literary reading relies on studentsÕ declarative knowledge of form.  Concern for this type of declarative knowledge has given rise to its own curricular framework within the English Language Arts, one that Beach et al. (2012) refer to as ÒEnglish language arts for the sake of understanding form.Ó  Beach et al.Õs analysis resonates with the findings of what is still the field of English EducationÕs most extensive national study of the literature curriculum in U.S. secondary schools.  In it, Applebee (1993), in conjunction with the National Research Center on Literature Teaching and Learning (NRCLTL), revealed the pervasiveness of a literature curriculum dominated by the study of genres.    !%(! For Beach et al., this curricular paradigm dedicated to knowledge of literary form includes knowledge not only of genre, but also of the formal devices that comprise the literary textÕs organic whole.  Elaborating this Òknowledge of literary and rhetorical formsÓ curricular framework, Beach et al. note that Òthe number of genre types and rhetorical structures that secondary students attempt to learn, often by rote [É] is remarkableÓ (p.26).  Their claims seem very much in sync with the observations of Willinsky (1991), whoÑin the midst of conducting classroom observations of literature unitsÑthumbed through the pages of studentsÕ high school anthologies.  Turning to Matthew ArnoldÕs ÒDover Beach,Ó he observed the word ÒsimileÓ inscribed in the margins next to each ÒlikeÓ or ÒasÓ that appeared throughout the poem. It was, noted Willinsky, as if the reader had foreseen the Òinevitable questions that follow the poem in English class like a head cold follows a sore throat: Identify the poemÕs three similes; In your own words, explain what Arnold means byÉÓ (p.54).    And, indeed, WillinskyÕs observations resonate with some of my own experiences teaching literature in the high school English classroom, where I can still picture the charts that covered my wallsÑveritable cascades of terms like asyndeton, synecdoche, metonymy, allusion, metaphor, simile, villanelle, Petrarchan sonnet, and the like.  As a teacher of Advanced Placement Literature, I seemed to share the concern of Stotsky, Goering, and Jolliffe (2009), who, in their investigation of literary study in Grades 9, 10, and 11 throughout Arkansas, identified as their primary impetus the fact that ÒAmerican students seem to graduate from high school with little literary knowledge and understandingÓ (p.7).  For Stotsky and her colleagues, this deficit of knowledge and understanding had to do with literary form and its contribution to understanding the overall meaning of a literary work.    !%)!Formalism as a Conglomeration of Skill, Strategy and Form  Knowledge of literary forms carries with it important implications for readersÕ skills and strategies, namely their ability to interpret literature. In a ÒformalistÓ approach to literatureÑarguably one of the most popular pedagogical approaches in the secondary literature curriculum (Applebee, 1993; Beach, 1993; Faust and Dressman, 2005)Ñreaders consider how the formal qualities of the textÑthe authorÕs character development, diction, figurative language, etc.Ñcollectively contribute to the overall meaning of the literary work.  Studies of the secondary literature curriculum (e.g., Applebee, 1993; Stotsky, 2010) revealed a prevalence of formal analysis, very much in the tradition of the New Critics, who in the early to mid-twentieth century, codified a set of techniques dedicated to ÒunlockingÓ a textÕs meaning. New Criticism achieved prominence in the mid-twentieth century as a reaction against Òold criticismsÓ that privileged knowledge of those things surrounding a text, namely authorial intention, as determinants of textual meaning.  In contrast to the Òold critics,Ó the New Critics deemed the long-standing emphasis on authorial intention the Òintentional fallacy.Ó   Readers, after all, could never really know an authorÕs intention behind her literary composition.  The New Critics also declared the readerÕs personal and psychological response to text insufficient grounds upon which to determine textual meaning (Wimsatt & Beardley, 1954). All a reader had was the work itselfÑthe textÑwhich possessed a certain organic unity that gave the work its meaning.   The reader, therefore, had a specific task: to engage in a close reading of the text in order to arrive at a valid interpretation consistent with the organic unity of the text as a whole.  Formalism has, from the time of New Critical theorists I. A. Richards (1929) and Brooks (1947), stipulated close reading as a rigorous, objective method for literary reading.  It should come as no surprise, then, that close reading has become the dominant currency of literary !%*!reading in a curricular era obsessed with measurable accountability and the tangibles of a knowledge economy: ideas, information, etc.  And though Hinchman and Moore (2013) are quick to point out that Òrecommendations for conducting the methodical interpretation of texts referred to as close reading vary in important waysÓ (p.443), the version of close reading put front and center in recent U.S. curricular documents is intended to be rigorous, objective, and oriented toward rational knowledge.  As presented in this description by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), close reading:  stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining its meaning  thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read  and reread deliberately.  Directing student attention to the text itself empowers students to understand the central  ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to  reflect on the meanings of  individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the  development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive  at an understanding of the text as a whole. (2011, p.6) Readers, it seems, are to attend to the formal qualities of textÑthe order of sentences, the choice of words, the overall order or organizational schema of the text as a wholeÑto Ògather observationsÓ (p.6) that, taken together, allow them to understand Òkey details and central ideas.Ó   Applying to both informational and literary texts, this definition of close reading positions literature as a tool designed primarily for the procurement of ideas and the rehearsal of rational analysis.  The Ethical Implications of Rational-Instrumental Approaches to Literature In reading across these traditions, curricular frameworks, and curricular documents that have governed the teaching of literature, literature appears to function primarily as a tool for !%+!knowing what or how to think, behave, or participate.  In other words, reading literature matters to the extent that it serves as rehearsal ground for knowing x or for knowing how to do x.  To conceive of literature as tool, then, is to privilege knowledge as both mediator and ultimate aim of literary reading, and to conceive of the reader as empty until somehow filled up by the text. What this means, then, is that literature, in the midst of adopting a more instrumental tenor to sustain itself against a backdrop of an increasingly technocratic agenda in education, is also complicit in sustaining inequality.  Chief among these inequalities is the implied superiority of text over reader.  Both Sulzer (2014) and Aukerman (2013) have critiqued the language of the Common Core State Standards  for promoting what they perceive as an impoverished view of readers.  Sulzer, for example, noted the degree to which the standards promote Òreading without foregrounding the necessary agents who enact it...readersÓ (p.141).  The standards, argued Sulzer, strip readers of their creative authority, placing Òa strict division between authors and readersÓ (p.142).  After all, to read is to analyze the authorÕs choices and the authorÕs ability to Òcreate effectsÓ (See e.g., CCSS Initiative, 2010, p.38).  To read literature, therefore, is to do no more than analyze or decipher someone elseÕs craft, functioning more as a static nounÑas in Òa ÔreadingÕ of a textÓ (Beach, 1993, p.16)Ñthan a dynamic action.  In such models of literary reading, like those promulgated by the Common CoreÑwhere reading seems more a noun, than a creative actionÑthe teacher might, like the text, assume a position superior to that of the reader. Teachers are easily perceived as Òmaster explicatorsÓ who possess the Òkeys to unlocking the textÓ that student readers have been given the task to analyze (Beach, 1993, p.17).  One dominant model of literary reading being taken up in classroom spaces, then, seems to position the author as creatively superior to the reader, whose lack of !%,!creativity renders her almost, if not entirely, invisible.  Reading is about a distribution of knowledge that flows from text to student-reader, andÑif the student somehow offers a less-than-legitimate readingÑfrom text to teacher to student. The dynamics of literary reading in the English Language Arts classroom, then, often abide by a set of hierarchical relationships overlooked in light of the degree to which they help to facilitate studentsÕ mastery of declarative or procedural knowledgeÑvaluable products in a knowledge economy.   Though arguments (e.g., Appleman, 2009) in favor of critical approaches to literature revolve to a certain extent around dismantling the hierarchies that privilege a teacherÕs authoritative reading, or a readerÕs overly personalized reading of a text, these approaches can also operate from a deficit perspective.  In attempting to authorize readers so that readers may resist texts, and in advocating that readers equip themselves with the more ÒexpertÓ knowledge of contemporary theorists, critical approaches to literary reading lose sight of the degree to which readers come to a work of literature already as seeing, thinking, feeling, evoking beings.  BrassÕs (2010) critique of ApplemanÕs introduction to her first edition of Critical Encounters underscores the hierarchical relationships at play in critical literacy education.  The reliance on theory, in particular, in critical frameworks for the secondary literature curriculum, produces and sustains those hierarchies, as: Écritical literacy theories are sanctioned to Ôredefine what counts as knowing in  literature classroomsÕ and to Ôreshape the kind of knowledge that students and teachers  might have of texts, themselves, and the worlds in which both reside.Õ Thus, the text  constructs studentsÕ more familiar [ÔatheoreticalÕ] ways of reading worlds as in need of  expert-mediated [ÔtheoreticalÕ] intervention. (Brass, 2010, p.716) !%-!BrassÕs commentary points to the ways that critical curricular frameworks for literary reading sanction, and therefore privilege, a particular way of knowing, while also implying that readers do not come to texts already knowing in these sanctioned ways.  According to ApplemanÕs framing of a critical literacies approach to the secondary literature curriculum, readers need the intervention of theories as well as explanations of theories to usher them into these new ways of knowing.  Thus, although advocates of critical approaches to literature instruction might claim that exposure to a range of contemporary literary theories can disrupt the hierarchical tendencies of literature instruction by destabilizing any one, single, privileged interpretation by the teacher, BrassÕs critique posits otherwise.  Literature, in a critical framework, often ends up functioning not only as tool, but as expert-mediated tool, where the expert is someone or something other than the reader.    As I see it, then, literary reading that abides by more instrumental commitments to acquiring skills, strategies, and even habits of moral behavior, generates a hierarchy in English Language Arts classrooms that might look something like the relationships sketched out in Figure 1.  The reader, aspiring toward the acquisition of skills, strategies, critical capacities, or cultural knowledge, engages with the text in a way that is both mediated by and directed toward knowledge.  The reader remains empty until filled up by the textÑa filling up that might also necessitate the mediating expertise of the teacher.  The ÒtoolingÓ of literature, then, not only makes literature an instrument in the acquisition of knowledge, but an instrument in perpetuating inequality.      !&.! Figure 1.  A visual of the hierarchical flow of knowledge in the literature curriculum                   Knowledge of x            Text (and teacher)  Reader Imagining Otherwise: Toward a Communion of Reader and Text   My delineation of the many ways literature has been treated as tool in the English Language Arts curriculum, and my surfacing of the dynamics of inequality at play in these more instrumental approaches to literary reading are in no way intended to debase skills, strategies, cultural knowledge, etc.  I say this as the composer of this dissertationÑan undertaking that has relied in large part on executing skills of interpretation, understanding the genre conventions of a dissertation, and implementing strategies of close reading, synthesis, etc. I say this as a teacher who has taught students struggling to bring their test scores up to grade level. And I say this as a teacher educator tasked with teaching preservice teachers who feel the pressures of accountability for their own studentsÕ standardized test scores. However, I am interested in exploring the possibilities that might exist in and for a literature curriculum where attention is diverted away from these more instrumental goals, and focused instead on ethical relationships of equality at play in literary readingÑparticularly those between reader and text.   Another echo  As an entr”e into this focused attention on the relationships at play in literary reading, I offer yet another echo, the whispered sighings of which reverberate throughout this project.  This !&%!echo hails from spring 2003. I was a sophomore in college, enrolled in a literature seminar titled Mark Twain and the American Imagination, where, in keeping with the expectations of the syllabus, I waded through a figurative sea of American classics: Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King ArthurÕs Court, to name a few.  Like most English majors, I wrote paper after paper in response to each of TwainÕs masterpieces, and in the cleaning frenzies to which IÕve grown addicted while writing this chapter, IÕve come across many of them.    The echo from that course that still spins as I write these words did not originate in one of those course papers though.  It originated on the eleventh floor of the library at the University of Notre Dame, where I sat reading The Diaries of Adam and Eve, a lesser-known gem of a book that Twain (1904) composed in the twilight of his career. In retrospect, I imagine the location mattered, given the degree to which my elevation and proximity to a window procured for me a star-studded backdrop for EveÕs soliloquy.  EveÕs words held me captive as, gazing out at a meteor-streaked sky, she confessed one of lifeÕs more heart-wrenching epiphanies:   By watching, I know that the stars are not going to last.  I have seen some of the best ones  melt and run down the sky.  Since one can melt, they all can melt; since they can all melt,   they can all melt the same night.  That sorrow will comeÑI know it.  I mean to sit up   every night and look at them as long as I can keep awake; and I will impress those   sparkling fields on my memory so that by-and-by when they are taken away I can by my  fancy restore those lovely myriads to the black sky and make them sparkle again, and  double them by the blur of my tears.  (p.123) TwainÕs cadence, combined with the imagery of fading stars, doubled by the blur of tears, elicited my own tears.  At 19, I was still relatively unscathed by loss.  Unlike Eve, I had not yet !&&!Òseen some of the best ones melt and run down the sky.Ó But there, on the eleventh floor of the library, the rhythm of EveÕs words rocking my soul, I found myself confronted by the inevitability of loss.  Even before Eve herself uttered those words, I knew them: ÒThat sorrow will come.Ó    So when three months later I lost my grandpa, himself a star-gazer, to an unexpected heart-attack, and I watched my mother crumple to the ground like a helpless child, I did what I felt needed to be done: I revisited TwainÕs passage that had struck a deep and painful chord within me, and I wove it into the eulogy I delivered at my grandpaÕs funeral.  It was my own manner of restoring him to the black sky and making him sparkle again.  That eulogy, one might argue, was my course paper in response to The Diaries of Adam and Eve.  With the semester long over, and Professor Werge, therefore, not privy to the paper, I wrote to him.  I thanked him for having introduced me to TwainÕs Diaries, and I shared with him what I had created out of that encounter with EveÕs soliloquy months earlier on the eleventh floor of the library.  And though I had not expected any reply whatsoever, Professor WergeÑtrue to his natureÑreplied with a hand-written note, excerpts of which I include below, along with his own first-edition copy of TwainÕs Diaries of Adam and Eve:  August 14, 2003 Dear Kati, I was sorry to hear about your grandfather, and at the same time extremely happy  that TwainÕs words complemented your own heartfelt words and sentiments.  I    learned long ago, though it was a hard-earned lesson, that when those we love die, every  reason  we have to feel bitter is more than matched by our own reasons to be grateful they  were with us, and graced us, as long as they did. All the rest comes down to faith, hope, !&'! and love.  IÕd like you to keep this first edition of EveÕs Diary. You have already made it  your own.  YouÕll find the passage on the page with this note.  Take good care,            Tom Werge  I think it is worth noting here (consistent with what I acknowledged above) that my reading of The Diaries of Adam and Eve, and the ensuing experiences of writing eulogies, letters, and even this dissertation, relied upon elements from the more instrumental curricular paradigms I outlined in previous sections.  Albeit subconsciously, I certainly relied upon strategies as I read that passage from Eve.  I cannot say for certain, butÑconsistent with reading comprehension strategiesÑI likely accessed prior knowledge and experiences and was all the more moved by EveÕs tragic realization because of prior experiences with others who had suffered the pangs of loss.  Though I did not engage in a careful annotation of the text by documenting its formalist qualities and attributes in the margins, those formal elements were nonetheless present, and were likely accentuated by my skilled ability to de-code punctuation. Stopping where the commas signaled a pause, for example, made EveÕs soliloquy all the more heart-breaking, given the degree to which it mimicked the pace and logic of EveÕs tragic epiphany: ÒSince one can melt, they all can melt.Ó With the pause of the semicolon, I was allowed to dwell in the inevitability of the stark reality that followed:  Òsince they can all melt, they can all melt the same night.Ó  I stood at the brink of the pause that parsed that compound sentence, literally feeling the words that came next: ÒThat sorrow will come; I know it.Ó  In fact, recent scholarship in the realm of affect theory (e.g., Brinkema, 2014), has worked to reunite a readerÕs aesthetic, affective response to text with the formalist qualities of the text itself, asserting that close reading and affect go hand-in-hand.  !&(! Although I relied on much tacit procedural knowledge throughout my reading of this passage, my engagement with EveÕs soliloquy on the eleventh floor of the library was not directed toward the acquisition of skills, strategies, or knowledge of literary form.  It was not an exercise in critically analyzing the ideological discourse at play in TwainÕs writing, or an attempt to acquire the cultural knowledge of 19th century American classics.   I have taken the time to recount this literary reading experience, and the pieces of writing born out of it, because I feel my reading of EveÕs soliloquy serves as an instance of what IÕd like to call literary communion.   Other scholars who have studied literature and the literature curriculum in secondary schools have offered their own terms to make sense of what happens, especially between reader and text, in an act of literary reading.  Bakhtin (1981), for example, conceived of literature in dialogic terms, imagining the readerÕs engagement with the literary text as a kind of dialogue with the author.  Rosenblatt (1978), whose ideas IÕll elaborate in greater depth in Chapter 3, theorized how a reader transacted, often times aesthetically, with text, andÑmore recentlyÑSmagorinsky (2001), building on RosenblattÕs theories, detailed what he called a culturally mediated transactional zone that readers inhabit as they engage with literary works.    These concepts are useful in trying to imagine how English Language Arts educators might more fully capitalize on readersÕ personal responses in the process of literary interpretation, correcting for the ÒNew Critical dogmasÓ that assert the Òindependence of the textÓ from the reader (Rabinowitz & Bancroft, 2014, pp.6-7).  They may even trouble the soundness of interpretations that might result when a readerÕs response ignores the text under interpretation.  However, while concepts like transaction, dialogism, and the culturally mediated transactional zone might explain, to some extent, the process of literary interpretation, they do not explain the tears that flowed as I came to the realization that even the best stars can melt. !&)!They do not fully capture the almost sacramental nature of the event that happened as I read EveÕs soliloquy and that continued to unfold when Òthat sorrow had comeÓ with my grandfatherÕs death. Literary communion, I think, does.   Communion with Literature   The term literary communion is not one I borrow from the writings of Jacques Ranci‘re.  It comes, rather, from my own spiritual sense of communion derived from my experiences as a practicing Catholic.  The term communion has become synonymous with participation in the sacrament of Eucharist, a sacrament through which Òwe unite ourselves (com- is a prefix meaning Òwith, togetherÓ) to Christ, who makes us sharers in his Body and Blood to form a single bodyÓ (unus means Òoneness, union.Ó) (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1331). The Greek word for communionÑkoinoniaÑappears in St. PaulÕs First Letter to the Corinthians, where he asks, in reference to some of the earliest practices of the Christian Mass, ÒThe cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation [a koinonia] in the blood of Christ?Ó  (1 Cor. 10:15-17).  Both the Catechism and PaulÕs letter present communionÑlike all sacraments--as a type of mutual participation, through visible, material signs, in the transcendentÑsomething bigger than ourselves.     The ecclesiastical connotations of the word communion might give some readers pause. As I have already mentioned in my unpacking of literatureÕs cultural heritage tradition, literature has certainly been used throughout history in spiritually coercive ways that run counter to equality.  In addition, the source of my own use of the term communionÑthe Catholic Christian traditionÑhas a history of patriarchy and magisterium that, for many, have come to epitomize hierarchy. This more hierarchical stigma seems at odds with the claims about literary communion I made in this chapterÕs introductory paragraphs: that it is the fruit of my own !&*!imagining how alternative relationships of equality might be different from the kinds of relationships between readers and texts that perpetuate inequality.  However, the connotations of Communion that I invoke in my own thinking and discussions about literary communion are ones I find to be commensurate with equality. The Eucharistic act of communing with Christ is due, in large part, to the Incarnation: ChristÕs taking on the flesh and thereby assuming equality with humankind.  As John proclaims in his Gospel: ÒThe Word became flesh and dwelt among us.Ó  It was ChristÕs becoming flesh that made possible the sacrifice of his crucifixionÑa sacrifice that the sacrament of Holy Communion memorializes through its gifts of ChristÕs body and blood.   Thus, the Christian narrative is, in some ways, a story of the possibilities that exist in Christ assuming a kind of equality with humanity.    My unpacking of literary communion throughout Chapters 3, 4 and 5 does not elaborate how it is that literary texts facilitate a union between readers and Christ.  This is not a project on literary evangelization.  Rather, I use three connotations of the term communionÑspiritual transcendence, transubstantiation, and thanksgivingÑto imagine a more sacramental coming together of reader and text alternative to the relationships assumed in the literature curriculumÕs more rational-instrumental frameworks.  Literary communion, in contrast to literary instrumentalism, is a coming together of reader and text as assumed equals.  To quote Bishop Robert Barron (2011), ÒThose who participate in communion never leave unchanged; they never go back the same way they cameÓ (p.194).  To speak of literary communion, then, is to speak of a Òtransformation into a communion, in which [reader and text] do not remain what [they] wereÓ (Gadamer, 1975, p.34).   I dare say I did not remain what I was after reading EveÕs soliloquy.  In the words of a reader whose stories appear in Chapter 4 of this dissertation, EveÕs soliloquy was Òin my muscles !&+!and in my bones.Ó  Having come face-to-face with the inevitability of loss, I, too, found myself sitting up every night, looking at my own figurative stars in my life for as long as I could keep awake.  The Diaries of Adam and Eve did not remain what it was either, becomingÑin addition to the literary diary it had always beenÑa gift, both a figurative one in the form of the eulogy I composed for my grandfather, and a literal one, in the form of the first edition copy I received from Professor Werge. Even Professor WergeÕs letterÑyet another gift born out of my initial engagement with EveÕs soliloquyÑevokes a sense of communion.  Its lexicon drips with a kind of sacramental spirituality. There is no analysis, no interpretationÑonly mention of things that transcend the rational world: namely faith, hope, and love.  Earlier, I offered a visual depiction of the relationships between readers and texts as they play out in the literature curriculumÕs more rational-instrumental frameworks.  Viewing those relationships through a lens of Ranci‘rian equality, I highlighted their hierarchical structures and their ÒtoolingÓ of literary texts for the sake of knowledge.  I will close this section here with my best attempt at visualizing literary communion in Figure 2.  Just as Ranci‘reÕs ethical lens has helped me see when and how relationships between readers and texts perpetuate inequality, his lens has also helped me to see how a relationship of equality might be different.   Literary communion, born out of an assumption of equality between reader and text, is one such possibilityÑa sacramental possibilityÑfor literary reading with implications for how English Education understands many of its pedagogical and curricular traditions, including close reading, reader response, and critical approaches to literature.  The chapters that follow are my own attempt at elaborating literary communion and its implications for these long-standing traditions.        !&,!Figure 2.  A visual of literary communion  Overview of Chapters  The details of my own communion with TwainÕs Diaries of Adam and Eve are, in many ways, a preview of what this dissertation is as a whole: an exploration into one possibility in and for a secondary English Language Arts literature curriculum that abides by equality.  Literary communion is one such possibility that I elaborate throughout Chapters 3, 4 and 5. I lay the groundwork for that elaboration in Chapter 2, where I reconstruct the Ranci‘rian conceptual framework that animates my theorizing of literary communion.  This chapter serves as the introduction to the notion that pulsates throughout all of Ranci‘rian philosophy and that serves as the unifying lens for my project: equality.  Chapter 2, I hope, lends greater clarity to this current chapter, where I have already applied a lens of equality to make visible the relationships of inequality between reader and text in more instrumental frameworks of literary reading.  In Chapter 3, I examine the work of literary theorist and educator Louise Rosenblatt whose scholarship on aesthetic transaction has, as she herself said, contributed to Òrevising the teaching of literatureÓ in a way that would make a readerÕs personal response the basis for growth toward a moreÉknowledgeable interpretationÓ (1990, p.100).  I engage with RosenblattÕs work because it has, like my own project on literary communion, worked to mend the perceived independence of the text from the reader inscribed in formalist traditions. Given the ethical nature of my work on literary communion, I apply an ethical lensÑRanci‘rian /01203!40$5!!&-!equalityÑto RosenblattÕs work on aesthetic transaction.  This lens allows me to imagine literature as being grounded not only in experience, as RosenblattÕs theory of aesthetic transaction assumes it to be, but also in equality.  It is this vision of literatureÑa vision of literature that assumes readers and texts to exist in a relationship of equalityÑthat allows me to imagine how literature might be open to a kind of communion between reader and text, one in which readers literally dwell or infuse themselves in the textual gaps between language and experience.   Whereas Chapter 3 uses a lens of equality to help theorize the relationship between reader and text assumed in literary communion, Chapter 4 uses Ranci‘rian emancipation and aesthetics to deepen my theorizing of literary communion as involving a kind of transubstantiation of both reader and text.   In this chapter, I consider the potential for emancipatory reading opened up by overthrowing the logic that attempts to determine the effect a work of literature can have on its readers. I use emancipation to trouble more traditional frameworks of literature instruction that claim to be emancipatory, namely critical frameworks. However, I also emancipate myself, to some degree, from Ranci‘reÕs articulations of emancipation, whichÑto my readingÑappear grounded primarily in rational-intellectual terms.  I conclude that the term ÒtransubstantiationÓ is more generative in unpacking literary communion as a kind of relationship between reader and text where wordsÑrather than abiding by rational-instrumental actions like decoding, interpretation, and analysisÑbecome flesh.    Chapter 5 lends one more dimension to literary communion by using the Eucharistic connotations of ÒgiftÓ and ÒthanksgivingÓ to re-read Chapters 3 and 4.  This re-reading serves as a summary of the discussions that precede Chapter 5, but also helps to reframe literature as a kind of mutual ÒgiftingÓ between reader and text. After discussing how it is that reader and text !'.!might function as dual subjects giving and receiving together, I return to the place this dissertation began: the secondary English Language Arts curriculum, and I elaborate the implications of literary communion not only for readers and literary texts, but also for English Language Arts teachers.                              !'%!CHAPTER 2 ÒPOEM-INGÓ RANCIéRE: CONSTRUCTING MY THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND MY METHOD/OLOGY  A method means a path: not the path that a thinker follows but the path that he/she constructs, that you have to construct to know where you are, to figure out the characteristics of a territory you are going through, the places it allows you to go, the way it obliges you to move, the markers that can help you, the obstacles that get in your way. (Ranci‘re, 2009a, p.114)  Attention alters what it touches [É] To write a poem isnÕt to paint by numbers, or to follow a cookbook recipe.  You donÕt take one metaphor, one surprising shift of relationship, and mix with one shift of grammar or view.  To write a poem, for me, is to weave a needed rope out of thin air, often in desperation, while falling.  (Hirshfield, 2016, Interview published online) Introducing Ranci‘re In the previous chapter, I outlined what I perceive to be the dominant traditions, curricular frameworks, and curricular documents governing the teaching of literature in English Language Arts education.  While I could have intervened on or engaged with those curricular traditions, frameworks, and documents in any number of ways, I chose to do so through a lens of equalityÑa lens I borrow from the French philosopher, Jacques Ranci‘re.  Ranci‘re invented his intellectual identity against a historical backdrop that Jean-Philippe Deranty (2010) has described as Òone of revolutionary effervescence all around the worldÓ (p.2).  Rising to scholarly significance in France in the 1960s, Ranci‘re came onto the French intellectual scene just a decade or two after post-war French intellectual giants Jean-Fran“ois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.  What set Ranci‘re apart from these intellectual icons, though, including his teacher, Louis Althusser, was what Jean-Philippe Deranty (2010) has !'&!described as Ranci‘reÕs Òconsistent attempt to scrupulously follow the implications of the idea that human beings are equal in all respectsÓ (p.3). Rather than unpacking the discursively and institutionally inscribed power structures contributing to systemic inequalities, Ranci‘re pursued a philosophical project dedicated to imagining the possibilities that might exist in treating equality as a presupposition rather than an end goal.  It is this equalityÑthe only equality that, in a Ranci‘rian frame, can be deemed realÑthat sits at the heart of my own project, and at the heart of this chapter where I construct a conceptual framework designed to animate my deepening and elaboration of literary communion.  My conceptual framework comprises Ranci‘rian equality, as well as two concepts that emanate from equality: aesthetics and emancipation.  This conceptual framework has felt to me much like the rope to which poet Jane Hirshfield refers in the epigraph that opens this chapter.  In other words, I did not enter into this project knowing that Ranci‘rian equality, aesthetics, and emancipation would animate my thinking on literary communion, nor was I able at the outset to conceptualize how or why these concepts might intertwine with one another.  These concepts of equality, aesthetics, and emancipation felt originally like disparate strands.  However, with time, and a great deal of thinking, reading, and writing, I have found a way to weave them together. Their convergence in this chapter and throughout this project is an act of making, not unlike the poiesis of poetry.    As the above paragraph attests, I find it impossible to talk about the animating concepts of this project without also talking about my methods.  Thus, this chapter lays both the conceptual and methodological groundwork for my project devoted to imagining and elaborating literary communion. For the past five years, I have taught a variety of teacher preparation courses devoted to Òmethods.Ó  I can always sense studentsÕ eagerness at the outset of those !''!courses, their blind hope that we will part ways 15 weeks later, their notebooks brimming with all that the course title promises: a list of Òthings to do,Ó Òstrategies to follow.Ó  As readers, you have likely entered this chapter hoping to leave with a sense of my research methodsÑthose things I have done and the paths I have followed that have allowed me to arrive at the arguments in subsequent chapters.  Methods, though, as Ranci‘re reminds us in the epigraph that opens this chapter, are not followed so much as they are constructed on the fly.  One task of this chapter, then, is to illuminate the constructed-ness of my project, orÑto evoke the Ranci‘rian epigraph that opens this chapterÑto give readers a sense not of the path I have followed, but the path I have, and continue to construct out of Ranci‘reÕs thinking as well as the lived accounts of my own and othersÕ literary reading experiences.   On Òthe Universe Conspiring:Ó Reading Ranci‘re While Writing Poetry  IÕd like to open this chapter, with its dual focus on key Ranci‘rian concepts and what I conceive of as my research methodology, with a story that speaks to the inseparability of these two foci.  My story is one that narrates my first encounters with Jacques Ranci‘re through reading.  My hope is that, by sharing it, I make more concrete the concept of Ranci‘rian equality and what it might have to do with reading literature.  In addition, I hope that my sharing this story underscores a key methodological point by illuminating the equality by which I have abided as a reader of Ranci‘reÑa reader who has rewritten Ranci‘re in the service of literary communion.  Indeed, this project on literary communion is itself a manifestation of the way reading literature might be an act of communion--an act through which neither reader nor text can remain what they once were.           My first years as a high school English teacher transpired in the sleepy plantation town of Donaldsonville, Louisiana, in a high school of no more than 150 students.  My drives to and !'(!from school those first few years of teaching took me down 60 miles of single-lane, sugar cane-flanked highway.  Somewhere along that blank canvas of LA-1, I dreamt up Ascension Catholic High SchoolÕs first parent-child supper and book club.  A decade has now passed, and IÕm fairly certain my copy of Paolo CoelhoÕs The Alchemist, a text over which we enjoyed sparkling conversation and spicy sauce piquant, is somewhere with a former student who had forgotten her copy the evening we all gathered to discuss it.  Without it, I am unable to recall many of the details beyond the basic plot line about a shepherd boy named Santiago questing for his treasure.  But I do remember that CoelhoÕs bestseller felt to me like a stitching-together of the kinds of passages that readers could chew on for days on end.  In several of those passages, Santiago would speak of a phenomenon I have thought about quite often in the years since:  one of the Òuniverse conspiring.Ó          As I begin this chapter devoted to re-constructing Ranci‘reÕs philosophy of equality, aesthetics, and emancipation alongside my methodological commitments, I cannot help but think about how my first encounters with Ranci‘re might best be described as an instance of the Òuniverse conspiring.Ó   I was a doctoral student when I began my forays into Ranci‘re. I had just completed a poetry seminar, and was newly enrolled in a philosophy of education seminar where my professor, Lynn Fendler, had invited us to consider Bingham and BiestaÕs (2010) Jacques Ranci‘re: Education, Truth, Emancipation as a possible course text.  I read it over the semester break, letting both it and the poetry reading and writing regimen I had established in my poetry seminar fill that three-week caesura between fall and spring semester. That juxtaposition of poetry and Ranci‘rian philosophy was just the conspiracy I needed to commence my construction of a path where poetry and philosophy have converged once more to give shape to this dissertation.     !')!     As I composed my own poetry, I came to feel the profound sense of equality at the core of Ranci‘reÕs project.  I sensed what poet Charles Simic described as Òthe labor of poetry:Ó  Òfinding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words,Ó and realized how the limitations of language demanded the creativity not only of writers, but readers as well (qtd. in Zwicky, 2003, p.85).  ÒThe poet,Ó writes Ranci‘re, Òstrives to say everything, knowing that everything cannot be said, but that is the unconditional tension of the translator that opens the possibility of the other tension, the other willÓ (1991, pp. 69-70). Working in the gaps between experience and language, I composed poems, all the while anticipating the ÒpossibilityÓ of the person beyond the words themselves: the reader.    Reading Ranci‘re while writing and imagining others reading my own poetry, I began to consider the implications of equality for literary reading.  I began to reflect on some of my most moving engagements with literature, as well as the lived accounts of other readers. My theorizing of literary communion is the product of all of this.  Therefore, what follows is not just an explanation of Ranci‘rian concepts, but rather a transformation, or a rewriting of Ranci‘re.  To rewrite Ranci‘re is, I believe, commensurate with the spirit of literary communionÑa commensurability I believe will become more apparent in Chapter 4 where I dwell on a kind of figurative transubstantiation possible in and through literary communion.  The idea of re-writing Ranci‘re also resonates with the observations of scholars who have expounded upon what it means to engage with Ranci‘reÕs work:   Understanding [Ranci‘reÕs work] does not consist in explaining it from a position of   superior knowledge and authority, but in translating it, in appropriating it within an  activity of (self- as well as social-) transformation that constantly rewrites the book  according to the ever-changing demands of the new situations. (Citton, 2010, p.37) !'*!And so begins my rewriting of Ranci‘rian philosophy, in the service of imagining and elaborating literary communion.   Key Concepts in Ranci‘rian Philosophy  Ranci‘rian equality   Given the ways that Ranci‘reÕs equality literally pulsates throughout and gives shape to other Ranci‘rian concepts essential to my project, I begin by reconstructing this key tenet of Ranci‘reÕs philosophical project. While much of the discourse of education, and even the teaching of literature, revolves around the bringing about of equality, Ranci‘reÕs equality problematizes critical theory's projection of equality into the future.  Equality, according to Ranci‘re, Òis a presupposition, an initial axiomÑor it is nothing.Ó  After all, to project equality into the future, as something eventually to be attained, is only to verify inequality.          As I have already noted, Ranci‘reÕs equality resulted in a philosophical project devoted to following the implications of the idea that human beings are equal. In other words, Ranci‘reÕs philosophical project is not about proving that all individuals begin as equals, but is rather about illuminating how equality, as a theoretical starting point, might transform the way individuals perceive and engage with the world.  His project, then, is not about what is so much as it is about imagining what might be possible in beginning from an assumption of equality.  My own project focused on literary reading in the secondary English Language Arts curriculum shares that interest in what might be possible.  Ranci‘rian equality, therefore, might best be described as a ÒlensÓÑone through which I critiqued the dominant curricular traditions and frameworks that have governed the teaching of literature in the English Language Arts in Chapter 1, and one through which I imagine literary communion.  Ranci‘reÕs recalibration of equality makes him the ideal conversational companion with !'+!whom to carry out a project that I ground in a humanities-oriented tradition.  Though not incommensurable with the standards set forth for social sciences research, humanities-oriented research in education has been likened to:         various forms of criticism intended to problematize unrecognized assumptions,  implications, and consequences of various kinds of educational practice, policy, and  research, as well as to challenge what these approaches take for granted as beyond  questioning.  In this way, humanities-oriented research in education is intended to foster  dissonance and discomfort with conventional practice. (AERA, 2009, p.482) By problematizing the treatment of equality as end goal, Ranci‘reÕs philosophical project fosters discomfort with frameworks that disguise, promote, or sustain hierarchical relationships.  This discomfort also serves as a launching-off point for imagining how relationships of equality might pose alternative possibilities.   In the case of my own project concerned with the dynamics of literary reading in the secondary English Language Arts curriculum, Ranci‘reÕs equality makes visible the hierarchical implications of more instrumental curricular frameworks.  Ranci‘rian aesthetics and emancipation remain tethered, like all things Ranci‘rian, to equality, but they each have a unique function in this humanities-oriented project dedicated to fostering dissonance and discomfort with conventional practice and imagining unconventional alternatives.  As IÕll begin to suggest in the next section, and then expound upon further in Chapter 3, Ranci‘reÕs philosophy of aesthetics might allow English educators to overthrow the hierarchical relationships that have characterized the literature curriculum by imagining literature as grounded in relationships of equality between readers and texts.  Ranci‘reÕs writing about what he termed the Òaesthetic regimeÓ might also open up a space in the literature curriculum for readers to do more than !',!analyze an authorÕs meaning.  Thus, Ranci‘rian aesthetics troubles the implications of literary instrumentalism intent on tooling literary texts for specific purposes, and renders literature conducive to a readerÕs self-emancipationÑa kind of emancipation with transformative implications for both reader and literary text.   I will elaborate these points about aesthetics and emancipation more fully in the sections below, and then more fully in relation to literature throughout chapters 3 and 4.  My point here has simply been to illuminate the ways that Ranci‘rian equality, aesthetics, and emancipationÑas concepts radically reoriented from the more normative sense of these termsÑcomprise a generative framework for a humanities-based project designed to foster dissonance and discomfort with the conventional practice of literary reading in the secondary English language arts curriculum.    Ranci‘rean aesthetics and its implications for literature   In keeping with his re-calibration of equality, from that of an end goal to a starting point, Ranci‘re also offers a more radical conceptualization of aesthetics.  Though aesthetics has more commonly been understood, in Kantian terms, as the philosophical study of beautyÑmost often the study of art-inspired beautyÑRanci‘re returns to the etymological root of aesthetics to refresh its meaning.  Aesthesis, the Greek term for the Òfaculty of sense, the capacity to both perceive a given and make sense of itÓ (2009b, p.1) is the launching-off point for Ranci‘reÕs unfurling of aesthetics.  Making sense of sense can, according to Kant, be done in three waysÑtwo of which, when viewed through a Ranci‘rian lens of equality, define a hierarchical order.  In the first way, the faculty of knowledge overtakes the faculty of sensation.  In the second way, the faculty of knowledge is made subordinate to the faculty of sensation.  The third way, which !'-!Ranci‘re conceives of as the aesthetic experience, is to overthrow the hierarchyÑto neutralize the division between knowledge and sensation: What I call the aesthetic dimension is this: [É] It is another kind of relation between  sense and sense, a supplement that both reveals and neutralizes the division at the heart of  the sensible. (2009b, p.3) Thus, aestheticsÑas that which reveals and neutralizes the division between knowledge and sensationÑis, for Ranci‘re, equality.  To introduce Ranci‘rian aesthetics into the curricular conversations about literature, then, is to intervene on the hierarchical relationships that characterize dominant curricular frameworks for literature instructionÑto overthrow them and to begin to imagine literature as a set of relationships grounded in equality.      Applying Ranci‘rian aesthetics as a lens through which to view the pervading traditions, frameworks, and curricular documents that have governed literary reading in U.S. schools can be incredibly generative.  These curricular frameworks and traditions comprise what Ranci‘re would call the distribution of the sensible, a Òcertain configuration of the givenÓ (2009b, p.3), or the system of divisions2 that assigns parts, associates meanings with those parts, and defines the relationships between things.  Ranci‘rian aesthetics--by overthrowing hierarchical divisions-- allows for a redistribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the divisions and roles that have traditionally disciplined or ÒpolicedÓ (Ranci‘re, 2010) the reading of literature.    As I tried to demonstrate in the previous chapter, more traditional curricular frames for literature thrive on the stability of relations between and among people (teachers, students, published authors), objects (texts), and modes of perception and signification (favoring, as is often the case within the Cartesian paradigm of U.S. schooling, knowledge as the primary mode !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!&!460!730896!503:;!<=02!>?!/189#030!5@!#2085#A?!560!2#=53#><5#@8!@A!560!=08=#>B0;!#=!!"#$%&'%("#)*#+",+-.!";!203#"02!A3@:!560!"03>!$%&'%("&/#:018#8C!>@56!D5@!>301E!1F135G!182!D5@!=6130HG!!(.!of ÒsensingÓ).  I outlined those predictable, stable relations in Chapter 1, noting how literature is often mediated by knowledge and taken up for knowledge.  Readers are the analysts of texts, which remain the products of someone elseÕsÑthe authorÕsÑcreative capacities.  Teachers assume the authority to mediate a readerÕs analytic interpretation and/or judge its validity.  Ranci‘rian aesthetics troubles the fixedness and the inequality of the positions and roles assumed in a more conventional, instrumental literature curriculum.  In fact, Ranci‘reÕs work dedicated specifically to literature3 does not equate literature with les belles lettres.  For Ranci‘re, literature does not intervene as literature because it possesses the specific properties of literary language.  Literature intervenes as literature when literature Òno longer addresses itself to a specific audience, one sharing a prescribed position within the social order and drawing ordered rules of interpretation and modes of sensibility from that ethosÓ (Ranci‘re, 2011a, p.12).  In other words, Ranci‘reÕs aesthetics, as evidenced by his writings about literature, affords the possibility of imagining an alternative ethos for engaging with literary textsÑone that supplies experiences of equality between readers and texts and that challenges the unequal distribution of capacities across the various players in the networked activity of literary reading.   Ranci‘rian emancipation   The alternative ethos for engaging with literary texts afforded by the aesthetic experience is one that stems, in part, from the untying of poiesis, the textÕs manner of making, from aesthesis, the textÕs manner of reception.  The reader, presumably equal in experience and capacity to the literary artist, remains free to deviate from any allegiance to the artistÕs actual or assumed intentions.  Literature, according to Ranci‘reÕs aesthetics, rejects a Òtheology of signification: the assumption of an unspoken element slumbering within speech to be revealed by !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 e.g., Ranci‘reÕs (2011) The Politics of Literature  !(%!the work of the criticÓ (Bewes, 2014, p.188).  With this logic overthrown, there exists space for readers to play with texts, to reinvent texts, to seize texts and form new texts of their own.   This act of reinventing texts, playing with texts, seizing texts and forming new texts of oneÕs own might best be described as a kind of emancipatory reading. By recalibrating equality as an assumption rather than a goal toward which to strive, Ranci‘re also offers a new logic of emancipationÑone that troubles the ethical implications of more traditional notions of literature and literary theoryÕs capacity for emancipation.  As I noted in my delineation, in Chapter 1, of more critical approaches to the literature curriculum, English educators have expressed enthusiasm for what they perceive as literatureÕs potential to serve as a tool for making readers aware of and thereby liberated from the ideological forces at play within texts. Focused on exposing oppressive structures that remain relatively invisible to the untrained eye, critical frameworks for engaging with literature evince a rootedness in the critical pedagogy camp.  Members of this camp (e.g., Giroux, McLaren) claimed to assist in emancipating the oppressed by making them aware of the power relations that define their situation.   But for Ranci‘re, who imagined equality as a starting point, rather than a goal toward which to strive, this emancipatory logic proves problematic.  Critical pedagogy, in a Ranci‘rian framework, falls short of its supposed emancipatory interest because it operates from an assumed divide between those who already possess a very specific mode of knowing and those who do not.  Emancipation, in the tradition of critical pedagogy, then, is exactly what Ranci‘re argued could not be emancipation:  a reliance on someone else, free from, and therefore aware of, the workings of power, who could help demystify these workings of power for others, so these others might join the ranks of the free.   !(&!In light of the contradictions between Ranci‘reÕs new egalitarian ethic and more traditional notions of emancipation, Ranci‘reÕs new logic of emancipation treats emancipation, quite simply, as something one does for oneself.  It is, as Ranci‘re (1995) noted, a kind of Òtesting of equalityÓ (p.45).  Artistic forms that identify with what Ranci‘re refers to as the aesthetic regime, where there is no assumed ÒeffectÓ of an artÕs form on the reader or spectator, where the reader is assumed to no longer Òshare a prescribed position within the social order and draw ordered rules of interpretation and modes of sensibility from that ethosÓ (2011a, p.12) remain open to a readerÕs emancipation.  In the context of literature, the emancipated reader is not she who relies on the knowing authority of theory, teacher, or text to see that which she could previously not. The emancipated reader is she who Òmakes her own poem with the poem before herÓ (2011b, p.6). This notion of emancipation leaves literature not only open to experiences of equality between reader and text, but also to a kind of transubstantiation, in which it is impossible for reader and text to remain fixed, stable, or unchanged.  An Elucidation of my Method/ology  Delving into lived accounts of literary reading  While the preceding sections serve as a weaving together of key Ranci‘rian concepts that will animate my elaboration of literary communion throughout subsequent chapters, these subsequent chapters are themselves a weaving together of Ranci‘rian philosophy with peopleÕs lived accounts of reading.  These lived accounts originate from people I imagine to be the most embodied readers of us all: English Language Arts teachers. I realize that interviewing teachers might seem a contradiction of sorts, given the way it appears to cater to the higher rungs of the hierarchies embedded in the curricular frames and traditions that have tended to govern the teaching of literature in English Language Arts (See Chapter 1).  However, my reason for !('!interviewing teachers stems from both a desire for my work to speak back to the English Language Arts curriculum, and a more general belief about curriculum: that it is not something external to teachers, that they somehow enact, so much as it is something that emerges out of their lived experience  (Aoki, 1986/2005).   I place my own stories of reading literature, as well as these teachersÕ stories gleaned from conversational interviews, on an epistemological plane equal to that of Ranci‘re. Ranci‘reÕs lens of equality guided my analysis of more traditional curricular frameworks for literature instruction, helping me to see when and how relationships between readers and texts perpetuate inequality.  This in turn inspired me to seek out lived accounts of literary reading that might offer glimpses into relationships of equality between readers and texts that look different from the more instrumental models of literary reading I outlined in Chapter 1.  It was not until I began studying these accounts that I began grasping for additional threads of Ranci‘rian philosophyÑsuch as aesthetics and emancipation-- with which I have woven together my thinking on literary communion.  The interviews    Over a span of eighteen months, I interviewed 11 different teachers, 3 male and 8 female, ranging from 2 years of classroom teaching experience to 32 years of classroom teaching experience. I located these teachers through a survey I had administered in the states of Illinois, Alabama, and Michigan, inquiring into teachersÕ reading and writing practices.  For the sake of this project focused on literary reading in the English language arts curriculum, I identified a list of persons who self-identified as avid readers of literature.  My first round of interviews served an introductory purpose, with my intention being to come to know these persons as English language arts teachers.  I asked each person, as we sat !((!together in libraries, coffee shops, and bookshops, to narrate how they had ended up in the English language arts classroom, whichÑin most casesÑelicited accounts about their experiences as readers and writers.  These first-round interview transcripts, along with each personÕs in/abilities to continue our conversations, led me to pursue more focused interviews with five persons--Dan, Margie, Jane, India, and Lisa-- some of whose accounts will emerge in later chapters.   My more focused interviews with Dan, India, Lisa, Margie, and Jane revolved around one or two concrete accounts of literary reading.  I did not specify whether the account needed to have originated in or out of schoolÑonly that the person needed to think about a literary work (a piece of writing produced in a narrative, poetic, or dramatic mode) that had left a lasting impression on her in some way, and that she be able to recount her experience of reading that literary work.  In keeping with the phenomenological traditionÕs interest in the lifeworld existentials (VanManen, 1990) of lived time, lived space, lived body, and lived relation, I oriented our interview conversations around these lifeworld existentials, so as to focus on the concrete details of the literary reading event.  In the case of these second-round interviews, which sometimes evolved into a third interview so that we might discuss a second reading account, I asked people to bring their chosen piece of literature with them.  I did this so that we might revisit a particular passage or two that factored into the literary workÕs lasting impression upon the reader.  When this revisiting occurred, the person would often re-read the passage after providing some context for it, and then talk in detail about where and with whom they had been, along with what they heard, saw, felt, and so on when they read this passage for the first time or in subsequent readings.   !()!I realize, of course, that Ranci‘re is not a phenomenological philosopher, and so--from a certain vantage point--to merge his philosophical project with lived accounts of reading might seem disjointed, if not entirely illogical.  My response to such an imagined critique is to argue that Ranci‘re and the phenomenological tradition--though different--are not incommensurate, and that bringing together Ranci‘rian philosophy with these lived accounts is an example of the kind of convergence of philosophy and empirical research that scholars of educational philosophy have found so generative (Wilson and Santoro, 2015).   In many ways, focusing on the temporality, embodiment, relationality, and spatial dimensions of reading literature challenged the more cerebral model of literary reading advanced by the rational-instrumental frameworks that Ranci‘reÕs lens of equality begins to problematize.  By detailing the specifics of time, body, relationship, and space that characterized a particular reading event, these persons also remained oriented toward an experience of reading where the unique particulars of time, space, relationship, and body matterÑwhere who, where, and with whom the reader is, in relation to the text, actually matters a great deal.   Data analysis     After transcribing these interviews, I engaged in a holistic reading approach (VanManen, 1990), where I attended to the text of an interview as a whole.  I read the transcripts for words or phrases that captured the fundamental meaning of the lived account, ruminating on these accounts and writing about these phrases in conversation with Ranci‘re and my own lived experiences of reading (like the one I detailed in Chapter 1). Reading across each participantÕs account of impressionable literary reading experiences, I observed themes like the following: that the reader somehow made the text her own; that there was a kind of sensory depth to the reading experience that suggested the reader was engaged both bodily and cognitively with the !(*!text; that the reader, though engaged with the text, also read ÒbeyondÓ the text; thatÑtemporallyÑthere was an alignment of sorts between the readerÕs time in life and the events and details of the literary text.  Guided by a Ranci‘rian lens of equality, I was interested in allowing these stories to feed my imagination as to how literary reading might defy the hierarchical distributions of the rational-instrumentalist frameworks I identified in Chapter 1.  The accounts people shared with me, as evidenced by the themes I articulated above, evinced an almost spiritual depth not accounted for in the more rational-instrumental uptake of literature in the secondary English language arts curriculum. I kept finding myself drawn to the phrase of India, who, in one of our interviews together, recalled the day her mother Òcame to me with A Wrinkle in Time, handed it to me as if it was my First Holy Communion or my Bat Mitzvah, and said, ÔYouÕre ready. ItÕs time.  ItÕs time you read this bookÕÓ  (Interview, 16 July 2015).  I detected in IndiaÕs recollections a kind of sacramental quality to her motherÕs feelings about readingÑthis sense that her life, thus far, had been preparing her to read A Wrinkle in Time, in a way comparable to the kind of preparation one undertakes in anticipation of a sacrament.  And so began my theorizing of literary communion as a way of imagining how relationships of equality between reader and text might lend a kind of sacramental quality to reading that looks and feels different from the more rational-instrumental treatment of literature that has seemed to characterize the high school English language arts curriculum.   As I noted in Chapter 1, Ranci‘re, I learned, could only take me so far in my theorizing of literary communion.  His lens of equality helped make visible the implicit hierarchies at play when literature is treated in rational-instrumental terms.   Wanting to imagine what other possibilities might exist when literature is approached, ethically, as if reader and text are equal, I !(+!found myself grasping, in the spirit of the Hirshfield epigraph, for a strand of Ranci‘rian philosophy that would allow me to do just that.  My grasping put me in touch with Ranci‘rian aesthetics as a way of overthrowing the hierarchies of instrumentalism and beginning to imagineÑalong with my own and other peopleÕs lived accounts of reading-- how relationships of equality between reader and text might be different.  That imagining is what produced literary communionÑa kind of sacramental event between reader and text that I deepen to some extent through the Ranci‘rian notion of emancipation, but which Ranci‘rian emancipationÑas I argue in Chapter 4Ñfalls short of elaborating.   There are, then, a number of threads that course throughout this project: various strands of Ranci‘rian philosophy, of peopleÕs lived accounts of reading, my own lived experience of sacrament.  Of course threads alone are not enough by which to hang. As Hirshfield notes, a rope is required for hanging, and so it is that process of Òweaving togetherÓ that IÕd like to elucidate next.  For Hirshfield, to write a poem is to weave together a needed rope out of thin air.  This Òweaving together,Ó is what I feel to be the essence of my methodology, lending credence to WittgensteinÕs assertion: ÒPhilosophiete man eigentlich nur dichten,Ó ÒIn philosophy we can only poem.Ó   What it has Meant to ÒPoemÓ Throughout this Project As I open this section on what it has meant Òto poemÓ throughout this project, I cannot help but call upon the scholarship that surrounds the arts-based, qualitative tradition of poetic inquiry.  Scholars have interpreted poetic inquiry to mean any number of poetry-related practices (See Prendergast, 2009 for a complete list) that range from a researcherÕs style and attitude toward writing (e.g., Cahnmann-Taylor, 2009) to methods of data collection, analysis, and representation that include the composition and presentation of actual poems (e.g., Furman, !(,!Langer, Davis, Gallrado & Kulkani, 2007).  ScholarsÕ meta-analysis of the ways poetic inquiry has been taken up suggests that poetic processes can be used both as a mode of reporting research, and as tools of discovering, or re-searching meaning.  These poetic processes--what I call the act of Òpoem-ingÓ--are what I intend to elaborate in relation to my own project in the sections that follow.  I highlight three processes in particular that I feel I have enacted throughout the writing of this project: reducing, concretizing, and evoking.  Each of these actions, I believe, aligns with Ranci‘rian philosophy and remains true to the phenomenological tradition that inspired my collection of readersÕ lived accounts.   Reducing: Writing as linguistic thickness  Earlier, I noted that my Ranci‘rian conceptual framework is the result of what I have felt to be a Òweaving togetherÓ of Ranci‘rian concepts that are themselves woven together with peopleÕs lived accounts of reading.  This Òweaving togetherÓ implies a kind of ÒthickeningÓ that is part and parcel of what it means Òto poem.Ó  Here, I think it is useful to return to the Wittgenstein quote: ÒPhilosophiete man eigentlich nur dichtenÓ and dwell on that final word, dichten, for which there is no literal English translation.  The German word dichte is associated with Òthickness,Ó Òheaviness,Ó or Òspecific gravity,Ó not unlike a reduction or concentrate that forms when heat is applied to a combination of liquids in the culinary sciences.  Basb¿ll (2005) has referred to the poem as Òa sort of linguistic thickness,Ó arguing that philosophical inquiry might be likened to the action of poetry for its composition of pure text--a crystallization of sorts-- Òone that is produced by thickening (writing, compressing) and trimming (reading, editing)Ó (http://pangrammaticon.blogspot.com/2005/06/epiphany.html).   These assertions resonate also with the phenomenological tradition underpinning my reliance on lived accounts, for scholars have argued that phenomenological research is !(-!fundamentally a writing activity (Van Manen, 2000).  My own weaving together of Ranci‘rian concepts and lived accounts has produced a kind of linguistic thickness derived from what was, at one point, a sprawling collection of interview transcripts and notes on my multiple readings of Ranci‘rian philosophy, but with much reading and re-reading of interview transcripts and Ranci‘rian philosophy, began to thicken.  The pages that follow, then, lend credence to Van ManenÕs assertions that Òresearch and writing are aspects of one processÓ (p.7), but also suggest, quite fittingly in a project on literary reading, that reading, research, and writing are aspects of one process.   The primary evidence for the linguistic thickening that has evolved over the course of this project exists beyond these pages before youÑin Google Docs never shared, in drafts of chapters that never felt as though they had congealed.  For example, at one point in the earlier stages of this project, in an iteration of this project other than the one you see before you, I found myself relying on the Ranci‘rian notion of politics to deepen my theorizing of literary communion.   As I read more about Ranci‘rian politics, though, I realized politics could not elaborate the transformative essence of literary communion, to the degree that emancipation couldÑand even emancipation, as I noted above, fell short.  I, therefore, began to edit out those Ranci‘rian threads of politics-- to ÒtrimÓ them, as Basb¿ll suggests.  What resulted was a ÒpurerÓ concentration of Ranci‘rian ideas that seemed more in alignment with the metaphor of communion that had itself crystallized through writing about my own as well as othersÕ lived accounts of literary reading.   When I argue that Òpoem-ing,Ó in the sense of linguistic thickening, has been a fundamental process throughout this project, I am embracing the made-ness of this research. This embrace is one that I feel to be methodologically consistent with Ranci‘rian equality. Rather than writing about Ranci‘re and/or lived accounts, I place Ranci‘reÕs philosophical project on !).!the same epistemological plane with my own and othersÕ lived accounts, and, in turn, compose something new, and more concentrated: something I call Òliterary communion.Ó  I Òmake my own poem with the poem in front of [me]Ó (Ranci‘re, 2009, p.36).    Concretizing: Using anecdotes Of course there is always a risk involved in leaning too heavily on existing philosophical frameworks.4  The end result of a project that relies so heavily on philosophy might seem too theoretical or abstract and therefore guilty of perpetuating the very hierarchies on which this project on literary reading hopes to intervene. Therefore, I ÒpoemÓ in yet another sense throughout this project:  by concretizing the abstract.  Poet laureate Ted Kooser (2005) has argued that poems do not begin with ideas.  They are instead Òtriggered by catchy twists of language or little glimpses of lifeÓ (p.14). Poems are rooted in the concrete.  Many of the lived accounts that readers shared with me appear as anecdotes that I lace throughout my writing.  I hope these anecdotes show that my commitments lay beyond fancy theoretical discourse, in the concreteness of lived experience--a lived experience that I share in common, IÕm sure, with readers of this project.  My use of anecdotes, then, serves as more than a Òwarm upÓ to more philosophical ideas or a way of making the seemingly esoteric ideas of Ranci‘re more palatable.  I use anecdotes throughout my chapters to locate my work in lived experience as a gesture of equality to my readers who, possessing their own lived experience, might counter translate (See Chapter 3) my work back to the experience they have lived and continue to live well beyond these pages.    Van Manen (2000) reminds researchers that phenomenological research Òdoes not start or proceed in a disembodied fashion. It is always a project of someone: a real person, who, in the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(!I00!/189#030J=!01"#21-!3+3$1"&#%,)#4-+#233&##!)%!context of particular individual, social, and historical life circumstances, sets out to make sense of a certain aspect of human existenceÓ (p.31).  The anecdote of my own lived experience of reading TwainÕs Diaries of Adam and Eve in Chapter 1, and the anecdote of my first encounters with Ranci‘rian philosophy in this chapter, are reminders of the concrete origins of this project dedicated to imagining literature through a lens of equality.  This project did not originate just with philosophy.  It originated in these little glimpses of life that I offer throughout this project.    Evoking  Finally, much of the artistic challenge of this project has existed in my commitment to one of the central functions of poetry: evocation.  Van Manen (2000) has characterized phenomenological research as working Òin spite of the words,Ó as a kind of ÒpoetizingÓ that involves Òspeaking in a more primal senseÓ or Òan original singing of the worldÓ (p.13).  The kind of writing Van Manen espouses--that which evokes a more primal sense rather than explaining somethingÕs meaning--resonates with Ranci‘reÕs rejection of explanation in the name of equality.  Ranci‘re is quite critical of explanation and the assumptions it makes about readers: specifically the assumption that reading is a pipeline of knowledge directed from the all-knowing text to the soon-to-be-knowledgeable reader.   In truth, it is pretty near impossible to explain peopleÕs lived accounts of reading, and Ranci‘reÕs prose, IÕve also learned, is impossible to reduce to an explanation.  As one of my participants, Margie, noted: ÒI have discovered/ That words come hardest to me/ When I try to talk of works that have moved me/ The most poignantly, the most profoundly.Ó  And so, in the spirit of defying explanation, I strive to evoke more than explain throughout this project.  The construct Òliterary communionÓ is perhaps my most obvious reliance on evocation, with my !)&!choice of the term communion based far more on its spiritual and sacramental connotations than on strict ecclesiastical definitions.   In one of his most famous works on aesthetics and emancipation, Ranci‘re (2011b) challenged the passivity of artÕs spectator, claiming that the Òspectator is active [...] He makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of himÓ (p.6).  What follows is the poem I have made with the poems performed in front of me: the poetry of readersÕ lived accounts, the poetry of my own lived accounts, and the poetry of Ranci‘re.   In my own quest to evoke, rather than explain, I hope I have underscored my own belief that the spectators of this work--my readers--are themselves active and capable of all that I argue remains possible in a relationship of literary communion between reader and text.                              !)'!CHAPTER 3 ENTERING INTO COMMUNION: REIMAGINING LITERATURE THROUGH A LENS OF EQUALITY  I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion.  A word meant something only between people, and lifeÕs meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.  It was the relational aspect--i.e., Òhuman relationalityÓ--that undergirded meaning. (Kalanithi, 2016, p.42) Introduction  Reflecting back on previous chapters, I have--up until this point--contextualized my theorizing of literary communion.  In Chapter 1, I made the case that the increasing technocratization of education in the United States has manifested itself in both the marginalization of literature (Alsup, 2015; White, 2015), and the instrumentalization of the English language arts (Brass, 2014), including literature.  In other words--to borrow language from Chapter 2--the distribution of the sensible in English language arts curricula is one that abides by a logic that uses literature for the sake of building cultural, critical, and skills-oriented knowledge.   Within a Ranci‘rian framework, the key question with respect to any distribution of the sensible is whether it is founded on equality or inequality.  By applying a Ranci‘rian lens of equality to more traditional curricular frameworks (Beach et al., 2012) that guide literature instruction in middle and high school English language arts curricula, I made visible the hierarchies embedded in these more traditional curricular frames.  For Ranci‘re, equality not only serves as a primary means by which to contest hierarchical and exclusionary distributions of the sensible, it also feeds the imagination of other arrangements.   And so, in that spirit, I !)(!introduced--at the end of chapter 1--an alternative arrangement to the relationships that undergird literary reading: literary communion.   There are multiple dimensions to literary communion that I will address before this project has ended, but--true to Ranci‘rian ethics--I will begin by elaborating how it is that literary communion functions as a relationship of equality between reader and text.  Throughout my own elaboration of the equality between reader and text, I will engage the work of reader response theorist and educator Louise Rosenblatt whose scholarship has done much to reform the teaching of literature.  As IÕll discuss, her transactional theory was ground-breaking in reformulating the relationality between reader and text--to the point where readers may wonder where her project ends and my own project begins.  Given the Ranci‘rian spirit of my project, the answer rests again, of course, in equality.  Rosenblatt was for all intents and purposes, a pragmatist, and so from her philosophical vantage point, her project was not so much about ethical relationships as it was about the way meaning- making occurred in the service of literary interpretation.  My own project is about ethics, and so--for that reason--I cannot claim that I am picking up where Rosenblatt left off.  A more accurate and fair description for what I aspire to do in this chapter is to say that I intend to apply an ethical lens--equality--to the work Rosenblatt has already done in and for the field of literature curriculum.  Applying that lens, I argue, might lessen the tendency toward one of the leading misappropriations of RosenblattÕs work: the bifurcation of a readerÕs aesthetic response to text from reading that pays close attention to the textÕs form.  Bringing Ranci‘reÕs ethical lens to bear on RosenblattÕs theoretical contributions, I argue that aesthetic reading, when considered through a lens of equality, requires a commensurability of reader response and formalism distinct !))!from RosenblattÕs transaction--more akin to what I consider a communion between reader and text.   RosenblattÕs Reconfiguration of Reader-Text Relationships  I begin this chapter wishing first to credit the scholarship of literary theorist and educator, Louise Rosenblatt.  RosenblattÕs work, dating back to her publication of Literature as Exploration in 1938, did perhaps more than any other theorist of her time to re-cast the reader in an active role.  Her work is not only of seminal importance in the canon of reader response theorists (Tompkins, 1980), but has continued to have lasting effects on the teaching of literature in English classrooms throughout North America (Justman, 2010; Willinsky, 1991), with Dressman and Webster (2001) labeling her the most oft-cited literary theorist in school literacy texts.    Chief among RosenblattÕs contributions is her delineation of a theory she called Òliterary transaction,Ó and that she later referred to as Òaesthetic transaction.Ó This theory is one that scholars (e.g., Blau, 2003) have identified as a source of reform in literature instruction. Rosenblatt, perhaps more than any other scholar before her time, steered the literature curriculum away from reverencing textual authority, so that readersÕ individual responses to texts might find a place in the English language arts classroom. For Rosenblatt, the process of reading literature was not so much about the reader mining the text for its self-contained meaning, so much as it was a process of ÒtransactionÓ between reader and text.  Transaction, for Rosenblatt, challenged the assumption of a one-way channel between reader and text through which a text somehow impressed its meaning upon the reader.  To speak of literary transaction meant that, for Rosenblatt, literary reading was Òa situation, an event at a particular time and place in which each element [reader and text] conditions the otherÓ (1978/1994, p.16).  !)*!RosenblattÕs choice of ÒtransactionÓ over terms like ÒinteractionÓ points to the progressive influence of John Dewey on her work, for it was Dewey and his colleague Arthur Bentley, who first developed this transactional terminology to re-think the supposedly linear relationship between organisms and environments.  Dewey and Bentley were adamant that the focus of their interests rested not so much Òin the operation of an organism upon an environment,Ó or Òin the operation of an environment upon organismÓ (Bentley, 1978, p.285).  They were interested rather in the ongoing process, or the total situation of organism and environment conditioning and being conditioned by the other.   Rosenblatt translated this interest in an ongoing process of conditioning in terms specific to literary reading, arguing in Literature as Exploration (1938/1995): In the past, reading has too often been thought of as an interaction, the printed page impressing its meaning on the readerÕs mind or the reader extracting the meaning embedded in the text. Actually, reading is a constructive, selective process over time in a particular context. The relation between reader and signs on the page proceeds in a to-and-fro spiral, in which each is continually being affected by what the other has contributed. (p.26) For Rosenblatt, the poem, novel, short story, literary essay--or whatever the literary work may be--existed not in the text itself, which to her, was only a collection of signs.  The real ÒworkÓ of literature existed in the transactional event of reading, in that Òto-and-fro spiralÓ between reader and text in a particular space and time.    RosenblattÕs emphasis on the non-linear relationship, as well as the continual reciprocity between reader and text, has done much in the English language arts curriculum to push back on the legacy of more extreme and often misconstrued interpretations of New Criticism: the search, !)+!through a close reading of the textÕs content and form, for the one ÒcorrectÓ reading.  A ÒreadingÓ of a literary text was, for Rosenblatt, not so much a noun--the meaning to be found in a text-- as it was a verb: the active constructing of meaning made in the transactional event between reader and text.  For Rosenblatt, the reader came to the text already as a seeing, thinking, feeling human being, whose evocation of the text mattered as much as the literal signs on the page.   In that sense, then, RosenblattÕs transactional theory appears to challenge the hierarchical logic of the rational-instrumental frameworks and traditions for literature I outlined in Chapter 1. I have often imagined RosenblattÕs transactional theory, if I had to diagram it, treating literature as a relationship between reader and text that looks something like the relationship outlined in Figure 3.  True to her rejection of a linear relationship between reader and text, this diagram captures the recursive spiraling between reader and text.  And, contrary to the more hierarchical configurations of the curricular frameworks I outlined in Chapter 1, the readerÑcoming to the text already as a seeing, feeling, thinking, experienced human beingÑis not empty until filled up by the text. In other words, in Rosenblatt's model, it seems the reader and text can conceivably ÒtransactÓ on equal planes.  Both reader and text prove equally essential to the literary reading process.   Figure 3.  A visual of the reader-text relationships implied in RosenblattÕs transaction                   Reader              Text    !),!English EducatorsÕ Translation of RosenblattÕs Theory: Inequality Perpetuated   Still, for Rosenblatt, there was no lens of equality as there is in Ranci‘reÕs project, to guide her conceptualization of literary reading as a transactional event.  To ÒtransactÓ implies a desired outcome, and for Rosenblatt, that outcomeÑthe primary goal she was after in her delineation of transactional theoryÑwas meaning:  Meaning emerges as the reader carries on a give-and-take with the signs on the page, As the text unrolls before the readerÕs eyes, the meaning made of the early words influences what comes to mind and is selected for the succeeding signs.  But if these do not fit in with the meaning developed thus far, the reader may revise it to assimilate the new words or may start all over again with different expectations.  For the experienced reader, much of this may go on subconsciously, but the two-way reciprocal relationship explains why meaning is not ÒinÓ the text or ÒinÓ the reader.  Both the reader and the text are essential to the transactional process of meaning making. (1938/1995, p. 27, emphasis added) Transactional theoryÕs legacy as a way of making meaning of texts is evident in the way RosenblattÕs work has been cited in curricular and pedagogical materials designed to enhance studentsÕ strategies and skills of literary interpretation.  For example, ApplemanÕs (2009) Critical Encounters in High School English cites RosenblattÕs work in a chapter devoted to teaching students to apply the basic tenets of reader response to Òstrengthen their interpretive possibilities.Ó Even Beach et al. (2012) classify RosenblattÕs transaction under their ÒReading Processes or StrategiesÓ framework for the English language arts curriculum, noting how educators have used her transactional theory to help students devise different processes or strategies for responding to and interpreting literature.  Without the equality that pulsates throughout Ranci‘reÕs project, the literary textÑeven in a transactional set-upÑcan function as a !)-!tool for the development of strategy or skill, thereby perpetuating the inequalities embedded in literatureÕs more instrumental curricular frameworks.  Without the equality that pulsates throughout Ranci‘reÕs project, RosenblattÕs transactional theory has remained open to yet another relational dynamic between reader and text that perpetuates inequality. There has been, to borrow from Willinsky, Òa certain imperfection in the adaptationÓ of RosenblattÕs work, or perhaps Òa selective use made of itÓ--one that concentrates on the Òisolated experience of the readerÓ (p.125).  Consequently, many pedagogical and curricular instantiations of RosenblattÕs work have resulted in a hierarchy of its own: one that privileges the readerÕs subjectively felt response to text at the expense of the form and content of the literary text itself.  This hierarchy has coincided also with a bifurcation of a readerÕs felt response from the act of close reading.  For as much as Rosenblatt herself advocated for a reading of the responses of close readers--those still engaged with the text itself--pedagogical and curricular instantiations of her work have fostered illusions of an entirely independent reader (Blau, 2003).  These illusions, along with an analysis of their possible origins, comprise the focus of this section and the next.  Examples of the kinds of unequal relationships between readers and texts that privilege a readerÕs personal subjective response have emerged in the scholarship focused on reader response pedagogies in middle and secondary English language arts classrooms.  For example, Juzwik (2013) found fault in what she conceived of as a literature unit conducted in the reader response tradition, claiming that her reader-centered lessons on The Diary of Anne Frank, resulted in studentsÕ less-than-meaningful transactions with text.  She focused in particular on two assignments within her unit-long study of Anne FrankÕs diary: a writing assignment inspired by studentsÕ reactions to Anne FrankÕs loss of her pen that invited students to reflect on a time !*.!they lost an object that was important to them, and a culminating assignment inviting students to compose diary entries corresponding to ten days in their own lives.  Not surprisingly, studentsÕ responses tended to reflect their own lives more than that of Anne Frank, suggesting students had not grappled with the complexities of a text that, given its relevance to the Holocaust, was a far cry from the comforts of a late twentieth-century American middle-class life.         JuzwikÕs (2013) assignments and her studentsÕ responses to them resonate with LewisÕs (2000) illustration of a rather troubling ethical implication of overly personalized reader response: the tendency for readers to see in texts only that to which they can relate.  Using an example from a class discussion about Christopher Paul CurtisÕs racially-charged text The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963, Lewis described how the class discussion Òused the aesthetic pleasure of personal response to devolve into a discussion of universal appealÓ (p.261).  In a discussion about the narratorÕs Buster Brown shoes, noted for the delight they arouse as he imagines trampling on the White figure etched into the soles, LewisÕs studentsÑmostly WhiteÑseemed most interested in commenting: ÒI had Buster Brown shoes.Ó  Caught up in their own enjoyment of reminiscing and relating, these students overlooked the narratorÕs important act of resistance written into the description of the shoes.  These examples from Juzwik and Lewis make visible the reality that, as much as reader response-based pedagogies have worked to correct what Rosenblatt (1993) herself described a  Òtext-oriented promulgation of an interpretation by a teacher,Ó they have fostered illusions of an entirely independent and naive reader.  In these cases of aesthetic transaction gone awry, the literary text fades into the background at best, or--at worst--out of the picture entirely.  Of course, Rosenblatt herself posited no such hierarchy.  Rosenblatt certainly valued the Ònever-to-be-duplicatedÓ readings of this particular reader in that particular moment. However, !*%!realizing what had quickly become a common misappropriation of her work, she also stressed that a readerÕs aesthetic transaction with text was not about Òabnegating the possibility of responsible readings of textsÓ (1993, p.382).  In other words, Rosenblatt was interested in readersÕ felt responses, but more specifically the felt responses of close readers.  In fact, Rosenblatt was quick to point out the intersections of her own reader response-oriented theories with the theories of the New Critics, who wereÑas noted in Chapter 1Ñstaunch advocates of close reading: ÒThe New Critics and I seemed to start out on the same path by deploring the neglect of literature as an art resulting from the traditional preoccupation with literary historyÉÓ (1990, p.102).  In other words, Rosenblatt found herself in harmony with a camp intent on combatting the preoccupation with literary history and authorial intention that had shifted readersÕ attention away from the literary text at hand. Rosenblatt concurred with the New Critics that the reader had a specific task: to engage in a close reading of the text in order to arrive at a valid interpretation consistent with the organic unity of the text as a whole.    Nonetheless, with the pedagogical and curricular instantiations of reader response theory having privileged readersÕ subjective, felt responses at the expense of the text itself, there has tended, in English language arts, to be an assumed bifurcation of reader response from formalismÑa rigorous close study of the textÕs content and form.  The rhetoric at play in Common Core author David ColemanÕs pitch for close reading provides a telling example of this polarity.  Reporting the results of an informal study conducted throughout Texas and Vermont, Coleman asserts: What we found was [...] that 80% of the questions kids were asked when they were reading are answerable without direct reference to the text.  Think about it, right? YouÕre reading a text, and you talk about [...] what it reminds you of, or what you think about, or !*&!what you criticize, or perhaps how you feel or react to it--because anything to avoid confronting the difficult words in front of themÉ (2011, p.10) In this commentary intended to advocate for close reading, Coleman pits a readerÕs reminiscing, her thoughts about text, her criticism, and her feelings--all those things that Rosenblatt saw as part and parcel to the readerÕs transaction with text-- as somehow separate from the text itself.  Stotsky et al.Õs (2010b) Arkansas-based study of literary pedagogy and achievement exuded a rhetoric similar to ColemanÕs, crediting Arkansas studentsÕ poor literature performance to too much reader response based pedagogy and not enough close reading. In a similar spirit of separation, Lois TysonÕs (2011) Using Critical Theory, a guide written for practicing teachers of literature, has a chapter dedicated to reader response and a chapter dedicated to textual analysis. These actions of a reader ÒrespondingÓ to text and a reader closely reading a text remain, at least in some of the fieldÕs pervading rhetoric, at odds with one another.   Ranci‘reÕs Invitation to Reimagine Aesthetics with Equality  One immediate question, then, is how one might make sense of the evolution of a hierarchy and a bifurcation that runs contrary to some of RosenblattÕs original writings. Given both the Ranci‘rian lens of equality that I bring to this project, and the way equality intersects with Ranci‘rian aesthetics, I would like to take a close look at RosenblattÕs treatment of aesthetic reading as a way of answering that question.  Both Rosenblatt and Ranci‘re work closely with a philosophy of aesthetics, but whereas Ranci‘reÕs aesthetics--like all things Ranci‘rian-- is grounded in equality, RosenblattÕs is grounded in experience.   WillinskyÕs (1991) analysis of RosenblattÕs framing of aesthetic reading seems a generative place to begin.  For as much as Willinsky praised Rosenblatt for moving literature instruction beyond the dry explication de texte, he also critiqued what he perceived as an !*'!increasingly narrow focus throughout her career. He saw in RosenblattÕs earliest work, Literature as Exploration, a defense for reading literature that held much promise for linking literature to democracy.   However, this linkage, he felt, had been lost in the reception of RosenblattÕs later work on aesthetic reading.  While I do not wish to dwell on the strand of WillinskyÕs argument having to do with literatureÕs role in a democracy, I do think his assertions bear relevance for nuancing Òaesthetic reading,Ó which he felt had been framed by Rosenblatt in existential terms and that focused increasingly throughout her career on the private, Òisolated experience of the readerÓ (p.125).   RosenblattÕs theory of aesthetic reading was, in many ways, an opportunity for her to deepen her theory of literary transaction introduced earlier in her career. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978), where Rosenblatt offered one of her more detailed elaborations of the difference between efferent and aesthetic reading, she discussed what she called aesthetic transaction.  For Rosenblatt, efferent reading took its meaning from the Latin term effere, meaning Òto carry away.Ó Aspiring toward more pragmatic ends, the reader directed her attention ÒoutwardÉtoward concepts to be retained, ideas to be tested, actions to be performed after the reading (1978/1994, p.24).  Though Rosenblatt tended to place efferent and aesthetic reading on a continuum, she still managed at times to portray them in mutually exclusive terms, claiming, Òthe text may be read either efferently or aestheticallyÓ (p.25).  Aesthetic reading, distinct from efferent reading, Òstir[s] up affective aspects of consciousnessÓ (p.33) as the ÒreaderÕs attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with the particular textÓ (p.25).    This experiential take on aesthetic reading reified one of RosenblattÕs focal assertions throughout all of her career: ÒThe reading of any work of literature is, of necessity, an individual !*(!and unique occurrence involving the mind and emotions of some particular readerÓ (1938/1995, p.32).  For Rosenblatt, literary reading might necessitate both efferent and aesthetic reading, but to read a work of literature, the reader must broaden her scope of attention to include the personal, affective aura surrounding the words that comprise the text.  This focus on what she termed the Òaesthetic experienceÓ seemed to imply that the ÒmeaningÓ made in the literary transaction might extend beyond an interpretation of the literary work to an interpretation also of self: During the aesthetic experience [...] We can participate in the tensions, the conflicts in  values, the choices, of the characters we have conjured up by means of the  texts.  Reflection on these, and awareness of our own responses to them can lead to self- understanding, self-criticism, perhaps a clarification or a reinforcement of values (1981,  p.22).    There was, then, a slight leaning toward the self and the readerÕs individual experience throughout RosenblattÕs elaboration of aesthetic reading that has been translated into pedagogical and curricular terms that have tended to diminish the importance of the text itself.   Many borrowers of RosenblattÕs work on aesthetic reading have tended, as Willinsky pointed out, to make selective use of her work--to see quite literally the image from a Wallace Stevens poem that Rosenblatt herself alludes to in The Reader, the Text, the Poem:  It was Òas if there was no book/Except that the reader leaned above the pageÓ (Stevens, 1964, p.358, emphasis added).  The source of RosenblattÕs notion of ÒaestheticÓ reading was a field that Ranci‘re proclaimed not to be the source of his own delineation of aesthetics: the field most often conflated with the philosophy of art. RosenblattÕs elaboration of aesthetic reading exhibited a rootedness in conversations of philosophers like John Dewey who claimed that art did not exist !*)!in the art object, so much as it existed in the experience of those encountering the art object (Faust, 2000). As I noted in Chapter 2, Ranci‘reÕs notion of aestheticsÑoriginating from a different source from RosenblattÕs--is inextricably bound with equality.  Whereas RosenblattÕs notion of aesthetics allowed her to locate art in experience, Ranci‘reÕs aesthetics identifies art--including literature, a language art---as giving rise to a new sensible experience wherein equality can be discerned.   In the section that follows, I use this Ranci‘rian notion of aesthetics to reframe how literature might be grounded--not only, as Rosenblatt imagined it, in experience--but also in equality.   A Literature Without Hierarchies  Distinguishing between representation and aesthetics   I feel it is important to qualify my above statement by acknowledging that literature, which I am conceiving here as a language art, has not always actually been received or even created, for that matter, on the grounds of equality.  One of Ranci‘reÕs greatest contributions to the arts has been his delineation of three different artistic Òregimes.Ó These regimes are not synonymous with specific temporal periods.  Rather, they function for Ranci‘re as a means of specifying what counts in art, and how art becomes active or not in distributing a sensible founded on a relationship of equality. Of the three regimes--which Ranci‘re labels the ethical, the representative, and the aesthetic--it is only the aesthetic regime that involves art in the mobilization of equality.  Scholars have referred to these regimes, particularly the distinctions Ranci‘re draws between the representative and the aesthetic regimes, as a ÒgatewayÓ (Deranty, 2010) into Ranci‘reÕs rich aesthetic philosophy.  Art identified with the representative regime perpetuated what Ranci‘re (2006) referred to as a Òhierarchical vision of the communityÓ (p.22). This hierarchical vision stemmed in large !**!part from the way the representative regime abided by strict conventions and rules, many of them codified in AristotleÕs (1449) Poetics.  So, the literature that abided by a representative logic adhered to a strict arrangement of form that was expected to mimic, to a certain degree, the real world.   For example, noble characters belonged in noble genres of tragedy, because Òtragedy,Ó wrote Aristotle, Òis the imitation of an action that is serious and complete.Ó  The more ÒseriousÓ actions fit for tragedy belonged in a Òdramatic, not a narrative formÓ (pp. 22-30). In addition to dictating a strict congruence between subject matter and genre, between action and modality, the representative regime also established a rather tight connection between poiesis--the textÕs manner of makingÑand aesthesis--the effects it produces. So, to use tragedy again as an example, the tragedyÕs dramatic form was intended Òto elicit [the audienceÕs] pity and fear.Ó Literature, in other words, abided by a logic that paired content and form and attempted to transfer directly from artist to spectator particular knowledge or feelings.   What matters most about the representative regime for my own argument is its role in perpetuating inequalityÑthereby paving the way for the aesthetic regimeÕs revolutionary overthrow of hierarchical conventions.  By demanding a specific correspondence among subject matter, form, genre classification, and audience reception, the representative regime made literature complicit in perpetuating inequality by respecting categories of high and low:   The representative primacy of action over character or of narration over description, the  hierarchy of genres according to the dignity of the subject matter...these elements figure  into an analogy with a fully hierarchical vision of the community.  (Ranci‘re, 2006, p.22) Demonstrating commensurability with the norms that govern society, the representative regime sustained hierarchies, where the ÒhighÓ peopleÑfor example, those who understood and appreciated the literary workÑdistinguished themselves from the lower, less refined !*+!masses.  The seating arrangements in ShakespeareÕs Globe Theatre offer a helpful illustration of this ÒhighÓ and ÒlowÓ classification.  The groundlings in the Globe Theatre arrived at "low" (bawdy, earthy) interpretations of Shakespeare, whereas the more elite patrons, seated above the groundlings, arrived at loftier, more refined interpretations. Whereas the art of the representative regime generated a hierarchical vision, the art of the aesthetic regimeÑas Òa rejection of the hierarchical relationÓ (Ranci‘re, 2009b, p.2)-- gives rise to a new sensible experience of equality.   There were, in the aesthetic regime, fewer mediating conventions with regard to artistic subject matter, expectation of form, and genre classification.  Anyone or anything could become the subject of art.  Ranci‘re used FlaubertÕs Madame Bovary as one of his most cited illustrations of the workings of the aesthetic regime, noting how Flaubert treated all thingsÑfrom the details of Emma BovaryÕs love affair to the descriptions of her hairpins--with the same care.  There was in FlaubertÕs novelÑvery much in contrast with the stipulations surrounding tragedy in AristotleÕs Poetics-- Òno border between what belongs to the poetical realm of noble action and what belongs to the territory of prosaic lifeÓ (Ranci‘re, 2008, p.237).    Importantly, too, the literature of the aesthetic regime untied the knot that, in the representative regime, linked poiesis to aesthesis.  Rather than determining the effect a work of art might have on its spectators, the aesthetic regime troubled this cause-and-effect relationship, thereby creating a space for viewers to assume an active role in the process of spectatorship.  For Ranci‘re, then, the literary texts of the aesthetic regime supplied experiences of equality.  They challenged the division of the world into unequal capacities.  One way of reading the shift from the representative regime to the aesthetic regime, then, is to read it as grounds for faith in the !*,!possibility of literature functioning in terms of equalityÑincluding assumed equality between reader and text.    Imagining literature as a verification of equality between reader and text  I have taken the time to delineate Ranci‘reÕs distinction between the representative and  aesthetic regimes because, to me, the difference between the two regimes illuminates the way literature can function as a set of relationships that either perpetuate inequality or verify equality.   Ranci‘reÕs delineation of an aesthetic regime, or the way literature intimates an order premised upon the cancellation of hierarchies, bears implications for my own argument intent on imagining a relationship between readers and texts that overthrows the hierarchical models of literary reading implied in rational-instrumental frameworks as well as the reverse hierarchies embedded in many of the pedagogical and curricular instantiations of RosenblattÕs aesthetic transaction.   In the following sections, I elaborate how it is that a literature curriculum, much in keeping with Ranci‘reÕs aesthetic regime, might verify equality between reader and text, so as to reframe RosenblattÕs aesthetic reading not only as an activity grounded in experience, but also an activity grounded in equality.   I consider how educatorsÕ treatment of literature as inviting translation, more than explanation, might imagine literature as being premised upon a community of equals.  These ideas, while important in showing how literature might be grounded in equality, also have important implications for mending the bifurcation of reader response and formalism.   Treating literature as defying explanation  One way that literature might be viewed as verifying equality of reader and text is in its defiance of explanation. IÕll begin by characterizing explanation as Ranci‘re did:  as a mode of !*-!inequality.   Ranci‘reÕs writing about explanation illuminates explanationÕs complicity in what he calls the police orderÑthe maintenance of the way things are:  During explanation, Òone establishes a certain linguistic relation with truthÓ (Bingham and Biesta, 2010, p.116).  This relation is one that Bingham and Biesta label a Òdirect lineÓ between language and meaning that leaves little room to redistribute the sensible by inserting oneself or others differently into an established configuration (p.116).  The distribution of the sensible maintained by the explicative order is one founded on inequality.  After all, the primary aim of the explicative order is the reduction of intelligence, which in and of itself points to a larger social order:  Òa world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, the capable and the incapableÓ (Ranci‘re, 1991, p.6).  To explain something to someone is Òfirst of all to show him he cannot understand it by himselfÓ (Ranci‘re, 1991, p.6).  In other words, the explicative mode operates from a deficit perspective, a Òhierarchy of inequalities,Ó (Ranci‘re, 2004, p.52) that, despite aiming to reduce inequalities in intelligence, only verifies inequality.      Many of the traditional curricular frameworks that govern the teaching of literature, like those I outlined in Chapter 1 where literature is mediated by and directed toward knowledge, conceive of literature as something to be explained.  For example, Jane, one of my interviewees who shared her experience reading The Little Prince conveyed her disappointment in some of the curricular guides designed for use with de Saint ExuperyÕs allegory.  Many of the questions contained in the guide asked students to explain the symbolism of the rose, or to explain the oft-quoted line, ÒYou are responsible forever for what you have tamed.Ó     JaneÕs reason for mentioning these questions and her disappointment in their unwillingness to move beyond explanation had to do with the way they so strikingly contrasted her own experience of re-reading The Little Prince, after reading it for the first time twelve years !+.!prior.  She felt the allegory, though as simple as ever in its presentation of language, had grown increasingly complex with time.  She turned my attention to one passage in particular--a passage where the Little Prince comments on the overly quantitative obsessions of adults:    Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask   questions about what really matters. They never ask: "What does his voice sound like?"  "What games does he like best?" "Does he collect butterflies?" They ask: "How old is  he?" "How many brothers does he have?" "How much does he weigh?" "How much  money does his father make?" Only then do they think they know him.  After reading the passage aloud, Jane noted: ÒI mean, I just canÕt explain that passage to anyone.  All I can do is savor it, kind of chew on it, you knowÑeven though the questions are simple.Ó  Jane pointed to the white space on the page, just below this passage.  These white spaces, which she called Òlittle puffs of air,Ó appeared at many places throughout the text, and she described how she treated those white spaces as a Òbreathing spaceÓ to just Òrest and savorÓ such simple yet profound passages.    Continental philosopher Charles Bingham (2011), using William Carlos WilliamsÕs ÒThe Red WheelbarrowÓ (1923) as an example, helps to illuminate what Jane noted about passages in The Little Prince--passages that Òyou just canÕt explain.Ó   The poet does not explain or make clear a wheelbarrow, or rain water, or white   chickens.  It is not as if there were such a thing as a particular barrow, a particular drop of  water [...]  And the reader of the poem is not called upon to understand exactly what the  poet has in mind. (p.518) Jane knew that her task in reading The Little Prince was not to understand de Saint ExuperyÕs allegory.  In fact, so many of the individuals I interviewed about their literary reading !+%!experiences noted how those works of literature corresponded with--as one person so eloquently phrased it-- Òcertain seasons of [their] life.Ó In other words, over time, certain passages from the text, or even the text as a whole, assumed different meanings.  These passages and texts evinced a certain layered-ness that defied explanation, and opened up a space for activities more aligned with rumination, or, to borrow from JaneÕs description, a kind of savoring.   The poem, notes Bingham, is ÒsharedÓ by the reader, Òbut not understood.Ó  To understand would imply a relationship of inequality--one in which the text (or perhaps, in the context of English language arts classrooms, the teacher of the text) as all-knowing, explains and generates understanding for the reader: the one who knows less.  But the artist does not explain: ÒThe artist needs equality as the explicator needs inequalityÓ (Ranci‘re, 1991, pp. 70-71).    Imagining literature as being premised upon a community of equals  When educators treat literature, as Jane did, as though it defies explanation, they imagine literature as being premised upon a community of equals.  Why the artist needs equality as the explicator needs inequality has to do with the fact that the literary artist works in the gap between language and experience.  The literary artist, rather than explaining experience, as I articulated above, presents an experience, finding all the while that no language can do complete justice to that presentation.  The literary text, then, might be conceived of as a translation of an experienceÑone that invites the reader to counter-translate.    [The artist] analyzes, dissects, translates othersÕ expressions, [and] he tirelessly erases  and corrects his own.  He strives to say everything, knowing that everything cannot be  said, but that is the unconditional tension of the translator that opens the possibility of the  other tension, the other will. (Ranci‘re, 1991, pp. 69-70) !+&!In other words, a literary text is the fruit of a creative labor, the labor of Òfinding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into wordsÓ (as cited in Zwicky, 2003, p.85).  That the literary artist Òstrives to say everything, knowing that everything cannot be said,Ó keeps open the possibility of the reader functioning as a kind of artistic counter-translator. One might imagine literature, then, as being premised upon a community of equals: translators (writers), counter-translators (readers), and translations (texts) replete with language that, in its defiance of explanation, assumes a certain materialityÑa life of its own.  Redefining Close Reading: The Inextricability of Aesthetics and Formalism   When Ranci‘rian aesthetics is used to reframe literature, as not only a site of experience, as Rosenblatt conceived of it, but also a verification of equality, the hierarchical privileging of reader over text seems more obviously troubled.  Moreover, attending to the formal qualities of the literary text, the materiality of its language--an action which Rosenblatt had to defend in her own elaboration of aesthetic reading--becomes an essential act in a readerÕs aesthetic response to text.  The congruence and continuity between a readerÕs aesthetic response and formalism is the topic I would like to take up in the final section of this chapter.  This mending of the bifurcation between reader response and formalism has implications for cancelling the hierarchies embedded in pedagogical and curricular instantiations of RosenblattÕs work, but also for reimaging close reading in terms very different from the version spelled out in standards documents that have made it the dominant currency of literary reading.   Close reading, in its standardized form, is to Òread closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from itÓ (NGA, 2010, p.10).  However, if literature, imagined as a verification of equality, defies explanation, then close reading is a Òmaking senseÓ of literature in more than logical terms.  It is about the reader engaging the language and form of !+'!a literary text to sense an experience that defies language yet that an artist has somehow made perceptible through language and form.  Within this framing of close reading, the formal qualities of a literary text are less tethered to the procedural and declarative knowledge I discussed in Chapter 1.  They are not qualities to be identified and explained, so much as they are the gaps between language and experience where readers may insert themselves and participate in the creative labor of literature.  They are the means of making words speak between and beyond the literal signs on the page.       I will illustrate this inextricability between a readerÕs felt response to text and formalism with an excerpt of a lived account from Dan, a high school English teacher in his fourth year of teaching.  In my two-hour conversation with Dan, we talked at length about his reading adventures with J.K RowlingÕs Harry Potter series.  For Dan, reading Harry Potter was like growing up alongside the seriesÕs title character.  Having read the first three books in a single summer, he proceeded to read the remaining four books one summer at a time, as each was released.   Each summer, he--like Harry, Ron, and Hermione--found himself a bit more advanced in age and wisdom.  RowlingÕs fifth book in the series was the one Dan wanted to discuss in our interview:  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  He was thirteen the first summer he read it, and the increasingly imminent threat of Lord Voldemort propelled him through all 870 pages in a 24-hour period. Two summers later, after he finished the seventh and final novel in RowlingÕs series, he re-read all seven books, returning once more to a scene in Book 5 that he could stillÑten years laterÑdescribe in great detail.  As he recounted to me: ThereÕs this scene where NevilleÕs mother, stuck in an insanity ward for life, hands him  an empty candy wrapper. And, what I remember is Neville slipping that candy wrapper  in his pocket as if it was the most precious thing in the whole wide world.  I cried when I !+(! read that scene the first time, and I cried again the second time.  I just ached when I read  it, and IÕve often asked myself in the years following that reading: WhatÕs worse? To be  orphaned, or to have parents who are physically alive but mentally and emotionally  absent? Dan clearly had a visceral response to this scene, and I was quite struck by instances like his where an interviewee could talk in such depth about a particular moment within a literary text.  Curious to learn more about what it was that triggered this sceneÕs staying with him all these years, I asked Dan if he would walk through this scene with me. What I share below is the result of that conversation.           The scene punctuates Chapter 23: ÒChristmas on the Closed Ward,Ó when Harry, Ron, Ginny, and Hermione pay a visit to St. MungoÕs hospital where Ron and GinnyÕs father, Mr. Weasley, is recovering from spell damage on Christmas Day.  Caught in the midst of an uncomfortable dispute between Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, Harry, Ron, Ginny, and Hermione venture off in search of tea, only to find they have stumbled upon the long-term resident ward.  There, they run into Professor Lockhart, their ex-Defense Against the Dark teacher, who has devolved into a pathetic state of mental instability.   This run-in with Professor Lockhart is the crescendo to the final scene that Dan could remember so well: a scene in which the young wizards cross paths on the same ward with their peer and classmate, Neville Longbottom. NevilleÕs presence on that ward is not by accident, though, for he is there to visit his parents, racked by insanity.  In contrast to Professor LockhartÕs almost fool-hearted glee at seeing visitors on his ward, Neville, we learn, is mortified, for he has admitted to no one that his parents are alive but insane.  And, so we, as readers, feel NevilleÕs !+)!excruciating embarrassment all the more poignantly when Ron engages Neville, completely oblivious to the circumstances:   With a sudden rush of understanding, Harry realized who the people in the end beds  must be.  He cast around wildly for some means of distracting the others so that Neville  could leave the ward unnoticed and unquestioned, but Ron had looked up at the sound of  the name ÒLongbottomÓ too, and before Harry could stop him had called, ÒNeville!Ó         Neville jumped and cowered as though a bullet had narrowly missed him.          ÒItÕs us, Neville!Ó said Ron brightly, getting to his feet.  ÒHave you seen? LockhartÕs  here! WhoÕve you been visiting?Ó (Rowling, 2003, p.512) RonÕs question drips with dramatic irony.  The juxtaposition of his own obliviousness, against both readersÕ and HarryÕs knowledge of the answer to that question, creates in readers an almost desperate feeling.  We feel HarryÕs Òsudden rush of understanding,Ó and his urgent inclination to distract the others so that Neville may leave in peace.  But RonÕs naive enthusiasm, combined with his ÒWhoÕve you been visiting?Ó moves Neville front and center, and extends the duration of this painful confrontation.  There is an irreversibility to RonÕs question, and we know it, becauseÑsomewhere in our own lives, though weÕre not sure where, weÕve asked those kinds of cringe-worthy questions.  As ÒNeville took a deep breath, looked up at the ceiling and shook his head,Ó Rowling notes, ÒHarry could not remember ever feeling sorrier for anyone,Ó and--as readers--neither can we (Rowling, 2003, p.513).          In the short page and half that remains, Ron, Ginny, and Hermione suddenly see what Harry has intuited from the beginning.  Caught in this realization that they have stumbled upon something deeply private, yet unable to reverse their presence, they witness NevilleÕs mother walking down the ward.  ÒShe no longer had the plump, happy-looking face Harry had seen in !+*!MoodyÕs old photograph,Ó Rowling tells us, and ÒShe did not seem to want to speak, or perhaps she was not able to, but she made timid motions toward Neville holding something in her outstretched hand.Ó    And, in what Dan described as a moment of Òtragic tendernessÓ between mother and son, Rowling juxtaposes dialogue and action in a way that forever humanizes unassuming, round-faced Neville Longbottom:         ÒAgain?Ó said [NevilleÕs grandmother], sounding slightly weary.  ÒVery well, Alice dear,  very wellÑNeville, take it, whatever it isÉÓ           But Neville had already stretched out his hand, into which his mother dropped an empty  Droobles Blowing Gum wrapper.          [É]          ÒNeville, put that wrapper in the bin,Ó said [NevilleÕs grandmother].  ÒShe must have  given you enough of them to paper your bedroom by nowÉÓ         But as they left, Harry was sure he saw Neville slip the wrapper into his pocket.  (Rowling, 2003, p.515)  Neville, we know, is ashamed.  His grandmotherÕs ÒAgain?Ó signals her own annoyance with what seems to have become a habit on the part of NevilleÕs mother.  And yet, Neville stands there, hand already outstretched, in anticipation and acceptance of a gift that--in form--is utter paltriness.  Readers can almost imagine, as Dan admitted to having imagined, a pile of gum wrappers somewhere in NevilleÕs room back home, each one precious for having come from his mother.   !++!        And finally, Rowling closes the door, leaving only Harry, Ron, Ginny, and Hermione standing there in a state of stark realization:           The door closed behind them.          ÒI never knew,Ó said Hermione, who looked tearful.          ÒNor did I,Ó said Ron rather hoarsely.          ÒNor me,Ó whispered Ginny.          They all looked at Harry.          ÒI did,Ó he said glumly. (Rowling, 2003, p.515)  RonÕs loud and drawn-out engagement with Neville just two pages prior is replaced with silence.   Not a single one of the young wizards is able to utter more than three words, and indeed, for an experience like the one just encountered, there really are no words.    From Aesthetic Transaction to Literary Communion  DanÕs account is one that attends to the formal qualities of the literary text, but not for the sake of ÒunlockingÓ the authorÕs meaning as the New Critics were so intent on doing.  His close reading seems disinterested, too, in achieving the outcomes of the now-standardized version of reading closely: to make logical inferences or determine what the text says explicitly.  In fact, neither the question that Dan generates from this passageÑÒWhat is worse? To be orphaned, or to have parents who are physically alive but mentally and emotionally absent?Ó--, nor the image of candy wrappers piled in NevilleÕs room back home--is contained anywhere in RowlingÕs passage.  For Dan, the dramatic irony, the artistic juxtaposition of dialogue, the contrast of loud and elongated chains of questions with short, wordless whispers are not in the text to be understood, so much as they are there to compensate for the failure of words to fully capture an !+,!experience. The formal qualities of the text are the products of RowlingÕs Òstriv[ing] to say everything, knowing that everything cannot be said.Ó    But it is that striving to say everything, while knowing that not everything can be said that Ranci‘re claims Òopens the possibility of the other willÓÑin this case, the readerÕs will.  To attend to the formal qualities of the text might mean, as it does in DanÕs case, dwelling in the gaps between language and experience and infusing those gaps with his own experience, his own abilities to feel, to imagine, to evoke.  DanÕs tears, his aching, his visions of candy wrappers piled in some sacred corner of NevilleÕs room, and his philosophizing about parental illness are all uniquely his responses to RowlingÕs passage.  But they are responses to the textÑnot necessarily aimed at understanding, or interpreting, or logically inferringÑso much as at entering that space between language and experience that the formal qualities of literary texts tend to occupy.   DanÕs reading hinged, it seemed, upon a relationship of assumed equality between reader and text.  Indeed, there is a way in which DanÕs account takes us back to an important, though I believe overlooked, phrase of RosenblattÕs description of aesthetic reading.  Rosenblatt, as I previously mentioned, defined aesthetic reading as a kind of reading in which Òthe readerÕs attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with the particular textÓ (emphasis added).  Whereas Rosenblatt focused increasingly throughout her career on what the reader was living through while reading, DanÕs account directs our attention to the relationship: his relationship, as reader, with the text of RowlingÕs novel.  That relationship seems, to me, to overthrow the hierarchies of rational instrumentalism.  DanÕs reading was not an instance of the text, through its formal qualities, impressing its meaning upon him.  He was not an empty vessel waiting to be filled up by the text or some knowledge the text might afford him.  !+-!His relationship seems also to overthrow the hierarchies apparent in pedagogical and curricular instantiations of reader response theories.  His subjectively-felt response did not emerge independent of or in total disregard to the text.  DanÕs account illustrates, to me, how literature simultaneously reveals and revels in all being(s) on the same plane.  DanÕs reading of Chapter 23 was akin to a kind of fellowship between reader and textÑa participation in something that, in keeping with the spiritual connotations of communion, was inherently common to him, and yet somehow simultaneously bigger than him.   This participation in something common to the reader, yet simultaneously beyond the reader, is evident in observations like DanÕs about ÒknowingÓ there is an irreversibility to RonÕs question because Òsomewhere in our lives, though weÕre not sure where, weÕve asked those kinds of cringe-worthy questions.Ó Observations like this one suggest that DanÕs engagement with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was, for him, a participation in being-nessÑor perhaps becoming-nessÑbigger than himself and bigger than the confines of RowlingÕs plot: It was a participation in the pain-ridden embarrassment of witnessing someone elseÕs suffering.  I think it is fair to say his engagement with the text had a more spiritual than rational depth to it.  DanÕs experience was not an experience of logical inference or explicit extraction.  It was, perhaps, more transcendental than instrumental.  His lived account carries with it the suggestion that reading literature might very well invite a kind of relationship between reader and text well outside the frame of rational-instrumentalism, with connotations different even from RosenblattÕs transaction.  His reading of that passage from Harry Potter might be more akin to participation in a kind of intimate fellowship: a communion with text.    In this chapter, then, I have broken beyond the frame of rational-instrumentalism that has historically shaped so much of the literature curriculum in English language arts.  I began with !,.!Louise RosenblattÕs seminal theory of aesthetic transaction, becauseÑin theoryÑit expresses interest in readersÕ personal engagement with texts, a phenomenon more overlooked in rational-instrumental frames.  However, applying a Ranci‘rian lens of equality to the pedagogical and curricular instantiations of RosenblattÕs work suggests that even RosenblattÕs work has been taken up in ways that further literary instrumentalism or generate hierarchies that privilege a readerÕs subjectively felt response at the expense of the literary text.    Using the equality of Ranci‘reÕs aesthetic regime to reimagine literature first and foremost, as a set of relationships of equality between reader and text, I came to see literary content and form as that with which a reader engages, but for reasons beyond logical inference or gaining knowledge.   The reader engages the literary text by virtue of its gaps between language and experienceÑgaps that she can infuse with her own imagination, thoughts, feelings, and experience to participate, in fellowship with the text, in an aspect of being-ness bigger than herself.   Literature, it seems, is well-suited to revel in the equality of beings, remaining open to this chapterÕs central concept:  readersÕ and textsÕ entrance into a kind of communion.             !,%!CHAPTER 4 TRANSUBSTANTIATIONS: WHEN WORDS BECOME FLESH  ÒThe Word was made flesh and dwelt among usÓ (John 1:14). Introduction   Part of the problem I have identified with the curricular frameworks and traditions that have tended to govern the teaching of literature is the degree to which they want to transmit directly from text to reader certain sentiments or forms of knowledge. Rooted in an assumption of inequality, these frames are what Ranci‘re, in his own work on education, refers to as ÒstultifyingÓ (1991). They run counter to one of the most generative, and as I hope to show in this chapter, life-giving actions of the aesthetic regime: its untying of the knot that binds poiesis, the textÕs manner of making, and aesthesis, the textÕs reception. This untying frees up a space in literature for the readerÑany reader for that matter-- to participate in, to play with, to reinvent the text to make real the Òpossibility of a spectatorÕs gaze other than the one that was programmedÓ (Ranci‘re, 2007, p.267).    In the previous chapter, I inscribed a lens of equality onto literature, treating literature as if it were a language art grounded not only in experience, as Rosenblatt imagined, but also in equality.  By applying an ethical lens of equality to the work on literary reading Rosenblatt has already begun, I was able to begin to imagine how equality between reader and text might lend itself to literary communion.  Joseph Tanke (2011), in his own delineation of Ranci‘reÕs aesthetics, argues that aesthetic art does two essential things: ÒIt engenders a form of equality in its production and reception,Ó and Òit carries the promise of life reconfiguredÓ (p.92).  I devoted my attention in the previous chapter primarily to the former, but nowÑhaving introduced literary communion as a function of equality between reader and textÑI wish to elaborate ways literary communion carries with it one of the promises of equality: the promise of a life reconfigured, or, !,&!perhaps more fittingly in light of its sacramental connotations, the promise of transubstantiation.  My goal in this chapter, then, is to flesh out another dimension of literary communion: the idea that literature might not only revel in the coming together of reader and text on equal planes, but also how that coming together might render impossible things remaining what they once were.     I use as my central theoretical concept in this chapter, emancipation.  This concept, I feel, invites us into the space opened up by the aesthetic regimeÕs untying of the knot between poiesis and aesthesis, where the reader is free to enact the Òpossibility of a spectatorÕs gaze other than the one that was programmed.Ó I use emancipation to trouble more traditional frameworks of literature instruction that claim to be emancipatory, namely critical frameworks. However, I also emancipate myself, to some degree, from Ranci‘reÕs articulations of emancipation, whichÑto my readingÑappear grounded in primarily rational-intellectual terms.  Reading one readerÕs account of her engagement with Peter ShafferÕs (1973) play Equus, I find that Ranci‘rian emancipation can only take me so far in my analysis. This readerÕs story, I conclude, is really more of an account of transubstantiation, in which words become flesh, delivering on the promise of a life reconfigured, as reader and text find it Òimpossible to remain what [they] once wereÓ (Gadamer, 1975, p.34).   The Fleshiness of Words I grew up a word-haunted boy.  I felt words inside meÉI mouthed them and fingered them and rolled them around my tongue.  My mother filled my bedtime hour with poetry that sang like Sanctus bells.  [The words] clung to me and blistered my skin.  I could arrange each day into a tear sheet of music composed of words.  I used words to fashion a world that made sense to me.  (Conroy, 2010, p.84) !,'! Author Pat ConroyÕs description of words lends a very different connotation to literary language than the one implied in the different curricular scenarios of literature I have discussed thus far.  Words, in those scenarios, are treated in more rational, disembodied ways, more fitÑin the case of formalismÑfor analysis, than being Òmouthed,Ó Òfingered,Ó or Òrolled around oneÕs tongue.Ó Recall from the previous chapter how Rosenblatt, in her delineation of aesthetic transaction, referred to words as ÒsignsÓ:    Meaning emerges as the reader carries on a give-and-take with the signs on the page. As  the text unrolls before the readerÕs eyes, the meaning made of the early words influences   what comes to mind and is selected for the succeeding signs.  (1938/1995, p. 27,  emphasis added) Conceived of as signs, words might help readers arrive at a defensible interpretation of the text, but they are not to be handled, held, and rearranged so that readers might use them, as Conroy says, to fashion a world that makes sense to them.  Conceived of as signs, words ask only to be, as Collins laments in his oft-cited poem, Òtied to a chair,Ó or Òbeaten with a hose,Ó to Òfind out what [they] really mean.Ó  ConroyÕs word-haunted confessions keep alive the materiality of language and suggest ways words might take on a readerÕs flesh, the way words allow readers toÑas Collins phrases itÑÒwaterski/across the surface of a poemÓ or Òwalk inside the poemÕs room/ and feel the walls for a light switch.Ó Believing in the fleshiness of words, one can see how readers do not just think, analyze, or interpret the language of literature. They embody it. They live it.   These more embodied versions of literary reading appeared in several of the lived accounts that people shared with me throughout this project. Recall, for example, JaneÕs reference to ÒsavoringÓ passages throughout The Little Prince.  Dan commented on the ÒacheÓ of !,(!reading that one scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  Both his account of reading and my own account of reading TwainÕs Diaries of Adam and Eve involved human tears.  Memorable, too, was an account that Lisa shared about her experience reading TolkienÕs The Hobbit.  Her mother, having moved the family to a cottage in the Northern part of their Midwestern state, decided that reading The Hobbit might compensate for their lack of TV and other more popular forms of entertainment.   We would come together as a familyÑthere were 10 of us children altogether-- for an  hour or so at a time, some us on the floor, others of us on chairs and couches, and we  would take turns reading it chapter by chapter, our voices rotating.  It was special because  there we were in the woods.  Sometimes we were snowbound, and all you could hear was  the voice of whichever one of us was reading, and weÕd listenÑkind of lean in, you  know--because we were so anxious to hear what would happen next.  My brothers even   got to the point where they had come up with their own voice for Gollum. To this day, we  still make Gollum jokes with one another when we see each other.  You know, ÒMy  Precious,Ó things like that.   LisaÕs account speaks to the way readers give voice to words, although not in the hierarchical sense of professing or proclaiming the Scriptural Word.  Her account seems to speak more to a particular dimensionality of words that, even in non-performance-based literary texts, requires the human voice to be brought to full realization.   Having described that specific reading event with her mother and siblings as a rotation of voices, LisaÕs account was akin to performance artistÕs Anna Deveare SmithÕs (2001) observations about the Òrhythmic architectureÓ that the human voice can lend to language (p.36).  In a way, it calls to mind a stanza from Billy CollinsÕs poem, ÒBooks,Ó in which the speaker claims to Òhear the voice of my mother reading to me/ !,)!from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,/ and inside her voice lie other distant sounds, the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,/ a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.Ó That these images from literature are housed inside a motherÕs voice serve as a reminder, like JaneÕs, DanÕs, and LisaÕs accounts, of the lived dimension of language, of the ways literary texts quite literally take on readersÕ flesh.  There is perhaps no better imagining of the way words might take on readersÕ flesh than the excerpted poetry of Margie, a research participant who-- up until this point--has not appeared in this project.  Her account will factor quite heavily into this chapter, but for now, I offer only her words as teacher, as reader, as poet:   Thirty years ago  I took a vow  Not to be tone deaf in the classroom.  And so I listen more than I speak,  Breathing spaces for you to fill  With wonderings, certainties,  Even silences.  And this year I discovered  That words come hardest to me  When I try to talk of works that have moved me  The most poignantly, the most profoundly.  I reentered the worlds of Williams and Kingsolver  And Albee and Shaffer  With you !,*! And began to realize and remember  How these works have lived under my skin  Intimately flowing between muscle and bone,  A lover within my own flesh. (Non)Emancipatory Frameworks for Literary Reading  I shift gears here for a moment to discuss those frameworks in English language arts education that proclaim to be Òemancipatory,Ó namely those frameworks that advocate for a critical approach to literature (e.g., Appleman, 2010; Tyson, 2011).  My discussion of these purportedly emancipatory frameworks carries implications for what I described above as the fleshiness of words, but first I wish to unpack the relational dynamics of these emancipatory frameworks using Ranci‘reÕs lens of equality.   Hierarchy #1:  Expert mediation   I use as an example the framework implicitly constructed in Deborah ApplemanÕs best-selling Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents. Now in its third edition and written for practicing teachers, ApplemanÕs text argues for the explicit instruction of theory in the English literature curriculum, including theories of Marxism, New Historicism, and deconstruction.  In the introduction that frames her book, Appleman is adamant that her critical approach to the study of literature is not intended to perpetuate, under a different name, the continuation of transmissive models of education.  Her vision for critical encounters with literature is not, she says, one in which the teacher is purportedly the Òmaster explicatorÓ of more theory-driven interpretations of culturally sanctioned texts.     In fact, she expends significant energy throughout the textÕs introduction explaining how it is that the explicit teaching of contemporary literary theory might help to authorize student-!,+!readers.  For example, she cites BonnycastleÕs (1996) work, noting how studying theory Òmeans no authority can impose a truth on you in a dogmatic wayÓ (p.34).  Continuing on, she cites GriffithÕs (1987) work on the application of literary theory, noting how literary theory promises to Òoffer pupils a sense of power over their environmentÓ (p.86).   This environment might even include the classroom environment, for the implications of teaching critical literary theory are such that teachers must be willing to Ògive upÓ their Òultimate authorityÓ (Appleman, 2010, p.11).  In short, the vision of literary reading that Appleman offers in Critical Encounters is one that seems to want to overthrow the hierarchical models of reading that privilege the text over the reader.  By advocating for a redistribution of interpretive power in the classroom, and by actively encouraging a multiplicity of interpretations, ApplemanÕs text seems almost to want to make real the Òpossibility of a spectatorÕs gaze other than the one that was programmedÓ (Ranci‘re, 2007, p.267).    Nonetheless, it is certainly possible to see how ApplemanÕs text, faithful to the traditional logic of emancipation, might be complicit in that which Ranci‘re perceived as ethically troubling: its perpetuation of inequality. The eventual divide between Ranci‘re and his own teacher, Louis Althusser, stemmed in part from what Ranci‘re perceived to be an inherent inequality in AlthusserÕs linking of theory to emancipation. Committed to the equality that already is, Ranci‘re saw in AlthusserÕs scholarship a disconnect between his desire to eradicate inequality and his method.   Rather than working to eradicate inequality, Althusser, from Ranci‘reÕs point-of-view, sustained inequality by insisting that revolutionary movements could not proceed without revolutionary theory.  Ranci‘reÕs ultimate criticism of AlthusserÑthat his logic only shifted the source of inequality, from that of class to that of knowledge (Panagia, 2010)Ñspoke to what Ranci‘re perceived as the fundamental problem with treating equality as !,,!an end goal:  Equality-to-come only sets the stage for continued inequality as it reinscribes inequality under the guise of seeking to eradicate it. Ranci‘reÕs complaints against Bourdieu followed a similar pattern. Especially critical of what he termed BourdieuÕs ÒtautologyÓ (Ranci‘re, 2003, p. 366), Ranci‘re railed against BourdieuÕs assumption that only the sociologist could reveal to the ÒexcludedÓ the reasons for their exclusion.  BrassÕs observations about Critical Encounters raise the possibility that its framework, and perhaps critical pedagogy more broadlyÑfor as much as it professes to emancipate readers from authorizing forcesÑmight also be complicit in perpetuating inequality. As Brass notes, Appleman purports to break with normative power relations in the English language arts classroom, but she also extends them.  Teachers and students, observes Brass (2010), are not ÒsimplyÉdefining themselves or ÔcriticallyÕ assessing their Ôdegree of complicity within a variety of competing ideologiesÕÓ (p.714).   They are simultaneously being governed by expert-mediated languages and techniques designed to assist them in monitoring and understanding their complicity in normativity.  In my own careful read of ApplemanÕs introduction, I found reason to agree with BrassÕs observations.  Appleman, at one point, refers to Òthe remediating lens of literary theoryÓ (p.8, emphasis added)Ña lens that teachers must Òactively sponsorÓ so as to ÒallowÉstudents to begin their own odysseys toward their own theoretical maturityÓ (Emig, 1990, p.94).  Readers, in other words, require the active sponsorship of teachersÑpresumably more theoretically mature in their outlook on the worldÑto become liberated from the policing mechanisms of ideology. What this amounts to, in a Ranci‘rean set-up, is that readers need inequality to become authoritative equals.  As Ranci‘re makes clear, though, the only thing perpetuated through the logic of this framework is inequality and there can be, then, no emancipation.                        !,-! Hierarchy #2: The superiority of rationalism ApplemanÕs framing of a critical approach to the study of literature also sanctions a particular kind of knowing that suggests the supremacy of reason.  One of BrassÕs key observations in his argument about the ways ApplemanÕs text is itself implicated in an act of governing is how adolescents in Critical Encounters Òare constituted as politically enlightened, intellectually deft, socially responsible and no longer complicit with dominant ideologies when they embody the analytical rationality and techniques of academic disciplines and theoryÓ (p.716, emphasis added).  In short, readers are emancipated from the policing mechanisms of ideology through the use of reason, specifically rational analytic techniques.  This criticism is not unique to ApplemanÕs work and is one often leveraged against critical pedagogy more generally (See e.g., Misson & Morgan, 2006).    Critical pedagogyÕs privileging of analytic rationality is not surprising in light of the dominant Cartesian paradigm that has tended to govern U.S. schooling.  Yagelski (2011) has identified as the central problem of the American education system its tendency to champion the self as Òautonomous observer/knowerÓ (p.17).  YagelskiÕs scholarship looks closely at the Cartesian frameworkÕs impact on writing instruction in the U.S., observing how writing is often taught Òas if it were an empty vehicle to carry meaningÓÑa simple chain of thought, turned language, turned text (p. 24).  What Yagelski observes about the impacts of the Cartesian mindset on writing instruction carry over, I think, into the realm of literature instruction, including literature instruction that claims to be emancipatory.  The analytic rationality of frameworks like ApplemanÕs seem built on the Cartesian assumption that reading literature is a matter of analyzing texts that are a product of that same simple chain: thought, turned language, !-.!turned text. Theory intervenes in order to assist readers in uncovering the ideologies complicit in both the thought and language that gave rise to the text.   What These Hierarchies Mean for Critical Curricular Frameworks   Applying a Ranci‘rian lens of equality to critical frameworks of literature instruction helps make visible relationships of inequality between readers and texts.  Contrary to Ranci‘reÕs logic of emancipation, critical frameworks do not locate the emancipatory capacity in the reader.  The emancipatory capacity, it seems, is located in rational theory and also in part in the teacher who, at the outset, is presumably more ÒexpertÓ or Òtheoretically matureÓ than the reader.  The distribution of roles deemed sensible within a critical framework is such that the reader is fundamentally passive and the text, requiring the mediating device of theory, is somehow beyond the reader.  TheoryÕs function is to help the reader ÒunderstandÓ and perform that which she is presumably not already doing: actively participating with the text.   The participation that critical frameworks for literary reading imagine, too, seems not to pay heed to what I have identified as the fleshiness of words.  Readers might use theory to rationally analyze the workings of ideology within text, but there is no sense of texts taking on readersÕ flesh, no sense as there is for Margie of how these works might Òlive under our skin,Ó Òintimately flowing between muscle and bone.Ó  There is, in short, a constraining estimation of readersÕ and literary textÕs capacities, and one might argueÑborrowing terminology from the previous chapterÑa reinstatement of the hierarchical logic of the representative regime.  As such, critical approaches to literature, and perhaps Critical English Education more broadly, abide by a logic that, within a Ranci‘rian framework, is non emancipatory.  The logic at play in these frameworks is what Ranci‘re calls Òstultifying,Ó keeping readers and literary texts in fixed places within an established hierarchical order.   !-%!Reimagining the Emancipatory Potential of Literary Reading  To imagine literature as that which is conducive to emancipation rather than stultification requires, I think, returning to the space Ranci‘re wrote about in conjunction with the aesthetic regime: the one created by de-linking a textÕs manner of making (poiesis) from an audienceÕs reception (aesthesis). Recall from Chapter 3 that this untying cancelled the supposition that literatureÕs content and form could determine a readerÕs response. In short, it opened up the possibility for readers to do more than simply de-code texts.  It opened the possibility for readers to play with texts, to re-write them, or to quote Ranci‘reÕs Emancipated Spectator:  Òcompose their own poemÓ with the poem before them.    Much of Ranci‘reÕs work in the area of aesthetics has construed the arts in general as being conducive to a spectatorÕs emancipation, but literature, for Ranci‘re, seemed especially conducive to a readerÕs emancipation in light of what Ranci‘re termed the Òwandering letter:Ó   Literature is the reign of writing, of speech circulating outside any determined  relationship of address.  Such mute speech, said Plato, rolls along this way and that  without knowing who is right to speak to and who is not right to speak to.  The same goes  for this new literature that no  longer addresses itself to a specific audience, one sharing  the same position within the social order and drawing ordered rules of interpretation and  modes of sensibility from that ethos.  Like the wandering letter [É], it circulatesÑ without any specific addressee and without a master to accompany itÉfreely available to  anyone who feels like grabbing hold. (Ranci‘re, 2011, p.12)   By conceiving of literature in this lightÑÒas circulatingÉwithout a master to accompany itÓÑRanci‘re freed literature from an authorizing figure capable of ÒpolicingÓ readersÕ use of it.   !-&! That literature might be free from a Òpolicing figureÓ seems generative, of course, for my own project intent on imaging how relationships between readers and literary texts might look different from the relationships of inequality inscribed in the literature curriculumÕs more instrumental frameworks.  Even the very image of the Òwandering letterÓ seems to challenge models of literary reading that conceive of reading as working Òwithin the four corners of the textÓ (Coleman and Pimental, 2012).  It seems to complicate the prescribed notions of legitimacy attached to the very specific kinds of procedural and declarative knowledge to which literary texts are so often subordinated in the school curriculum, including the rational analytic application of theory advanced by critical frameworks.  In short, Ranci‘reÕs notion of the wandering letter recognizes in literary reading a freedom from any policing authority that--in the quest to de-code authorial intention, rely on expert-mediated theoretical intervention, or perfect the latest skill or strategy--demands the reader Òsee this thing, feel that feeling, understand this lesson of what they see, and get into that action in consequence of what they have seen, felt, and understoodÓ (Ranci‘re, 2007, p.277).   Several of the accounts readers shared with me throughout this project helped animate this Ranci‘rian concept.  ReadersÕ accounts sometimes documented instances of literary texts circulating and re-circulating throughout a life, forging relationships, opportunities, and texts impossible for any authorizing force--other than their own wills--to ever have anticipated.  MargieÕs account was perhaps the most evocative telling of this kind of experience, and so I share her account, both as an illustration of literatureÕs Òwandering letter,Ó but also in anticipation of theorizing what I call transubstantiation.      !-'! The ÒPhilosopher-QueenÓ: Introducing Margie           There are many descriptors I could assign Margie, among them reader, teacher, poet, musician and mother.  When I met Margie for the first time, she was standing on the brink of retirement.  It was June 13, and it had only been four days since she had packed up Room 610, her English language arts classroom at the local public high school, for the last time.   Facing an open road of time and possibility, she spouted off a litany of possibilities for the year ahead: piano practice, membership in not one, but two poetry writing groups, and a possible home-grown mother/daughter book club.  The most fitting descriptor for Margie--after having spent so much time in conversation with her, her poems, and even several of her students, --is perhaps one derived from a speech delivered on the eve of her retirement:  Philosopher Queen. From her colleaguesÕ perspective, Margie was a life-long learner, a musician, a poet Òwilling to bring her whole life Ð all her vulnerabilities, her dreams, her creativity and life experience, her triumphs and her defeats, her unbridled passion into the classroom.Ó Her classroom, they argued, was Òfrenetically and deliciously alive.Ó           These descriptions of Margie made sense against the backdrop of insight I had gained into her lived experiences after nearly nine hours of interviews.  All of our interviews transpired in a local bookstore, andÑin retrospectÑsuch a setting could not have been more fitting.  In our first interview together, she described her college education as the truest of liberal arts educations given her method of course selection.  Refusing to be steered by program requirements, or even course descriptions, Margie would roam the aisles of the university bookstore browsing the titles of books organized by course.  When she found a cluster of books that piqued her curiosity, she looked for the corresponding course number and enrolled.   Eventually, Margie had enough credits to graduate as a theatre or education major, !-(!and though she chose a career path in education, she never abandoned her love for music and drama. To her, teaching, music and performance were inseparable. As evidenced by her poem that appeared earlier in this chapter, Margie defied the conventional tropes of literature instruction so often played out in middle and high school English language arts classrooms. She wanted, as she said in our second interview together, for the study of a literary work to be ÒMore than just, ÔOK, we did that. Now we can check it off the syllabus.ÕÓ  Margie wanted her students to make something with the literature they read.  As she noted in our second interview, ÒI always wanted to have them do something they created, so that the link between themselves and the literature was solidified, in many cases forever.  I wanted to have them do something to like, put it on their bones, so itÕs in their bone and muscleÓ (Interview, July 14, 2015).  When I asked Margie if she could talk about a specific work of literature that was in her own muscle and bone, she shared with me her experiences with Equus, the 1973 play by British playwright Peter Shaffer.  Inspired by a British newspaper clipping about a seventeen year-old boy arraigned for blinding six horses, ShafferÕs play unfurls primarily through the dialogue between the young boy, Alan, and a child psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Dysart, who has been tasked with understanding the roots of AlanÕs actions.  In his quest to make sense of AlanÕs actions, Dysart begins to ponder his own decisions in lifeÑa life that he perceives as being quite small. AlanÕs story, then, becomes just as much the story of DysartÕs tragic realization of how he might have lived a more daring life.   Reading Equus             Margie was a freshman in college, enrolled in a modern drama course the semester she read Equus.  Her professor, Arthur, had included it on his syllabus that term. Having already !-)!taken another course with Arthur the semester prior, Margie was well-versed in his pedagogical expectations, perhaps best summarized in the statement atop each of his syllabi: ÒVoyeurs need not apply.Ó  Margie had shed, she said, all voyeuristic tendencies at the threshold of ArthurÕs classroom, where she learned to read Òwith every ounce of [her] being.Ó          It was Act I, scene 10 of Equus that Margie, in our second interview, recalled most vividlyÑa scene where Dysart, the psychiatrist, asks Alan to talk about his first experience with a horse, hoping that AlanÕs answer might begin to make sense of the crime that has resulted in his arraignment. Alan eventually succumbs to the invitation, taking the psychiatrist back in time to the beach, where, a few years prior, Alan had been digging in the sand, unnoticed by his distracted parents.   A stranger rides by on horseback and asks Alan if he would like to ride, andÑas ShafferÕs stage directions indicate, ÒAlan nods, eyes wideÓ (p.38).  He then slips into a trance of memory, prompted by the psychiatrist Dr. DysartÕs question: DYSART:    How was it? Was it wonderful?         Alan rides in silence.                     CanÕt you remember? HORSEMAN:  Do you want to go faster? ALAN:         Yes! HORSEMAN:  OK.  All you have to do is say ÔCome on, TrojanÑbear me away!ÕÉSay it then! ALAN:  Bear me away!  (Shaffer, 1973, p.38) Like Alan, who succumbs to the memory of being swept away on the back of a horse, Margie, in our interview, let the memory of her first reading of that scene completely overtake her.  She recalled how Arthur, mimicking the actions of Alan mounting the strangerÕs horse, mounted the !-*!table at the center of the classroom.  ÒIt was beautiful, just beautiful.  Arthur was up there literally doing the scene--literally riding that horse. He said to us, ÒOk, IÕm Alan on that horse.  What am I feeling? What am I seeing?Ó (Interview, July 14, 2015).  As she remembered this first reading of Equus, MargieÕs own hands moved as if she too were riding the horse, as if ShafferÕs play, and her experience reading it, still intimately flowed between muscle and bone.   There were few words to Act I, scene 10, but the picture Margie had crafted for herself of AlanÕs being borne away on the horse dripped with detail:  The shoreline stretched as far as the eye could see, the water glistened, wind rippled through AlanÕs hair as he galloped at a height removed from his parents.  What Margie imagined as she read that scene is perhaps best articulated in her own piece of literature: a poem she gifted to her senior English language arts students over thirty years later.  Her final stanza, proof again that Equus still flowed between her muscles and bones, is an allusion to Equus, out of which she carved a litany of hopes for her own students:  I wish you the Alan-atop-the-horse-at-the-beach kind of love, Free and unrestrained by a bit in the mouth, That bareback kind of love that feels everything. Mostly, I hope that you give yourself permission to, Give yourself the freedom to Gallop in the heat of the wind With your hair flying behind you, At sunrise when the light is almost blinding Or at midnight when the fog of the night !-+!Permeates your pores. And it is then, At that very moment, That I wish for you Bold and daring hands That are willing to let go the reins.  The depth at which Equus flowed between MargieÕs muscle and bone seems evident in her affect-laden diction throughout her poem: mention of fog that ÒpermeatesÓ pores, references to a Òbareback kind of love,Ó Òthe heat of the wind,Ó Òblinding light.Ó There is a kind of ÒfleshinessÓ to MargieÕs language that points to one way that ShafferÕs words have become flesh. But the depth at which Equus flowed between MargieÕs muscle and bone was never so apparent to me as it was when she shared with me the reverberations of ShafferÕs play throughout her marriage. ÒThat play,Ó Margie told me as our conversation about Equus continued, Òwas actually the reason I got divorced.Ó  Margie had been married to a Vietnam veteran, who suffered, she said, from PTSD.   ÒI kid you not--,Ó she said, Òthere were nights he went to bed with a gun next to his head.Ó After pleading with him to stop, after hiding the gun in the closet, after years of therapyÑall to no availÑMargie made the life-altering decision to divorce him. I kept telling myself, ÒOnly you can shrink or grow your life, Margie.  Only you.Ó    The phrase, ÒOnly you can shrink or grow your life,Ó had become for Margie a kind of mantra to live by, but it had originated in her reading of Equus, where she had become haunted, she said, by DysartÕs gradual and tragic realizations about how small he had made his own life.   !-,!In light of EquusÕs detectable reverberations throughout her poetry and marriage, I was not surprised at all to learn that Margie, like Arthur, had integrated ShafferÕs play into the AP literature course she had taught at the local public high school for the past 17 years. Each year, too, until the year he died, Arthur visited MargieÕs class, performing for her students the scene he performed for his own class that spring semester of MargieÕs freshman year.    Really, I find it impossible to convey this account of MargieÕs reading of Equus without also talking about Arthur.  He was, of course, the person who introduced her to Equus.  But his presence throughout her lived accounts seemed so much more deeply and intricately woven than that.  From the semester of that fateful modern drama seminar, until quite literally the hour of his death, Arthur was what Margie described as a Òkey playerÓ in her life.  Not surprisingly, then, his name surfaced in each of our three interviews together, sometimes with accompanying tears. To Margie, he was Òthe dearest of friendsÓÑa statement to which even some of her poetry lends credence.  In her poem, ÒYour Last Class,Ó it is Arthur that Margie addresses, writing to him from the space of his own living room where she had come to keep him company in his final days of life: And I am the daughter of your classroom, The student who refused to be a voyeur, The one who rejects learning as passive tourism. I am the closest you will come to a legacy, And I have come to hold your hand as you die. Throughout our interview, where she re-enacted for me the scene from Act I that Arthur had animated so many years prior, and that she had continued to animate throughout her life, Margie fulfilled the lines of her poetry: She was indeed ArthurÕs legacy. Equus still flowed between her !--!muscle and bone.  It still pulsed through her ÒBold and daring handsÓ Òwilling to let go the reins.Ó From Emancipation to Transubstantiation  MargieÕs account suggests that both she and Equus had come to occupy that emancipatory space opened up by the untying of poiesis from aesthesis.  Hers is an emancipated reading of Equus, because it is Margie herself who, in the spirit of Ranci‘rian emancipation, seized ShafferÕs text and formed new texts of her own: new poems, new friendships, new marital arrangements.  Her accountÑan intricate confluence of past, present, and future phases of her, ArthurÕs, and othersÕ (e.g., high school students, her ex-husband) livesÑis a testament to MargieÕs freedom from demands that she Òsee this [one] thing, feel that [one] feeling, understand this [one] lesson.Ó Had MargieÕs reading of Equus transpired within a purportedly emancipatory framework like the one Appleman constructs in Critical Encounters, it is conceivable that MargieÕs account would have been very different in flavor, involving perhaps the application of some sort of critical lens to ShafferÕs play.  But MargieÕs account speaks to a kind of unmediated relationship between reader and text as authorized equals.   While Rancieriean emancipation helps make visible the relationship of equality between reader and text in MargieÕs account, alternative to the assumed inequality between reader and text in the alternative critically-inspired scenario, I do not believe it accounts for the full extent of what transpired in MargieÕs emancipatory reading: a literal embodiment-- or Òfleshing outÓ--of Equus.    In other words, MargieÕs accountÑthough animating the logic of Ranci‘rian emancipationÑmight also involve more than Ranci‘rian emancipation can account for, in that it overthrows the supremacy of reason.    !%..! Ranci‘reÕs recalibration of emancipation as something one does for oneself is cast, for the most part throughout his writings, in more rational intellectual terms.  For example, in one of his more detailed discussions of emancipation, Ranci‘re uses as recourse Joseph JacototÕs portrait of the ignorant schoolmaster.  An exclusively French-speaking instructor, Joseph Jacotot found himself confronted with the unique pedagogical task of teaching a class of students who spoke only Flemish.  Inhibited by the language barrier from receiving explanatory instruction from their French-speaking instructor, JacototÕs students relied solely on a bilingual text of the work they were learning.  Navigating between the French text on one side and the Flemish text on the other, the Flemish-speaking students responded successfully in French to their reading assignments:   They had looked for the French words that corresponded to words they knew and the  reasons for their grammatical endings by themselves.  They had learned to put them  together, to make, in turn, French sentences by themselves:  sentences whose spelling and  grammar became more and more exact as they progressed through the book; but, above  all, sentences of writers and not of schoolchildren. (Ranci‘re, 1991, p.4) JacototÕs studentsÕ autodidactic behavior suggested that the schoolmasterÕs ÒmastershipÓ did not rest in his transmission of knowledge, but simply in his command to read, re-read, and respond.  JacototÕs framework, argued Ranci‘re, was an emancipatory framework, with the students freeing themselves from the explanatory crutches of a schoolmaster.    The vision of emancipation contained in this example that has become almost iconic throughout Ranci‘reÕs writings is one imbued with the language of rational intellectualism: The students had learned to translate from Flemish to French.  The indicants of their emancipation were proper spelling and grammarÑthe products of a sound capacity to reason. Even Ranci‘reÕs !%.%!later work on the intersection of aesthetics and emancipation preserves this kind of language, where, talking about the theatrical spectator as active, Ranci‘re writes, Òhe observes, he selects, compares, interpretsÓ (2011, p.6).  But pausing for a moment to consider MargieÕs actions that comprise her reading: she imagines, she evokes, she feels, she poeticizes, she divorces, she befriends, she teaches.  How difficult it is, she noted in that first excerpt of poetry I shared in this chapter, to find rational language to talk of literary works Òthat have moved me/ The most poignantly, the most profoundly.Ó   In other words, there is something about her engagements with literary works like Equus that transcends, and possibly even defies, reason.  MargieÕs actions and observations suggest ways in which Ranci‘reÕs casting of emancipation in more rational intellectual terms might render it incapable of fully capturing the essence of MargieÕs account.  MargieÕs account seems to overthrow not only the inequality of more traditional notions of emancipation, but also the hierarchy of rational intellectualism that, in my own read of Ranci‘rian emancipation, remains somewhat intact.   MargieÕs account evokesÑperhaps more than emancipationÑtransubstantiation.  As I aspired to make clear in my opening chapter, my elaborations of what I call literary communion take some inspiration from the connotations of the Catholic Christian term communion, as it relates to the Eucharistic sacrament.  The Eucharist, or communion, as I noted in Chapter 1, is a sacramental extension of the Incarnation across space and time through which Christ continues to commune, in an embodied way, with the Church (Barron, 2011).  Catholic Church teaching, then, subscribes to the phenomenon of transubstantiationÑthe literal transformation of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of ChristÕs body and blood.  IÕd like to borrow both the connotations of transformation and flesh associated with transubstantiation as it relates !%.&!to communion, considering how, in reading literature, words canÑas my opening epigraph suggestsÑÒbecome flesh and dwell among us.Ó   If we reflect again on MargieÕs engagement with Equus, there are ways her account evokes a sense of words becoming flesh.  To borrow lines from her own poetry, hers is an account of a literary work that has Òlived under [her] skin,/ intimately flowing between muscle and bone,/ A lover within [her] own flesh.Ó  The ÒfleshinessÓ of MargieÕs poetic diction resonates with an account that might be read as her own Òfleshing outÓ of ShafferÕs drama across a span of many years.  In that space between reader and text that the aesthetic regime helped to imagine as a productive site of play, imagination, and reinvention, a literary work always stands poised for further elaboration and adaptation. Regardless of what ShafferÕs authorial intentions or ArthurÕs pedagogical intentions might have been, MargieÑthrough her own capacities to imagine AlanÕs coastal horseback rides, to feel DysartÕs hauntingly tragic realization-- made of Equus the mantra, ÒOnly you can shrink or grow your life.Ó This mantra is one that she adapts into stanzas of her own poetry, replete with its own fleshy language (ÒI hope you give yourself permission to/Gallop in the heat of the wind/ With your hair flying behind you,/ At sunrise when the light is almost blinding/ Or at midnight when the fog of the night/ Permeates your poresÓ).  Flowing between muscle and bone, it is also one that takes on the flesh of a life-altering decision to end her marriage.  In showing that words can become flesh, MargieÕs account also evinces the kind of transformation inherent in transubstantiation.  Given my focus throughout this project on the relationship between readers and texts, I wish to comment briefly on what might be perceived as transformations of both Equus and Margie in light of their communion. EquusÕs inhabitance Òunder [MargieÕs] skinÓ itself suggests a kind of change in MargieÕs overall composition.  One !%.'!might argue that she performs that change when she makes the pivotal decision to end her marriage.  She redefines herself by reconfiguring relationships that carried implications for her own identity. By choosing to Ògrow her lifeÓ by ending her marriage, Margie transformed herself from ÒwifeÓ to Òex-wife.Ó  Equus, of course, remained the 1973 play by Peter Shaffer. It also, thoughÑas evidenced by MargieÕs accountÑbecame one piece of a larger constellation of people and decisions and poetry.  It became, for example, a solidifying force in the friendship between Margie and Arthur. More than a discrete and static object of interpretive analysis, Equus was for Margie always in the process of becoming: a mantra to live by, the inspiration for her own stanzas of poetry, and perhapsÑwith timeÑsomething else that neither she, nor I, nor her once-living teacher Arthur could have imagined in that freshman seminar when Margie and Equus communed for the first time.    In the previous chapter, I elaborated how literary communion is prefaced on the idea of reader and text coming together as equals, but in this chapter, the sacramental idea of transformationÑmore specifically, transubstantiationÑhas been my focus.  I have tried to live up to a claim I laid out at the end of Chapter 1: that literary communion is a kind of ÒtransformationÓ in which reader and text Òdo not remain what [they] wereÓ (Gadamer, 1975, p.34).  Ranci‘rian emancipation is helpful in imagining an unmediated relationship between reader and text, one made possible by the de-linking of poiesis from aesthesis, in which the reader is free to play with, re-imagine and re-invent the text.  MargieÕs account illustrates this kind of emancipated relationship with ShafferÕs Equus, but it also suggests something far more sacramental about literary reading that, in my read of Ranci‘rian emancipation, is not accounted !%.(!for: the way words can become flesh and dwell among people in ways impossible for things to remain what they once were.   This chapter, then, carries implications for the structured hierarchies of the literature curriculumÕs rational-instrumental frameworks that tend to ÒpoliceÓ the positions and capacities of the people and objects comprising the literary network.  MargieÕs account tells a story of literary reading outside the frame of rational instrumentalism where literary texts are mediated by and directed toward knowledge.  Hers is a story of emancipated reading not mediated by theory, andÑas suchÑan account that troubles the ethical implications of purportedly emancipatory frameworks like those that govern the critical literature curriculum. In many ways, the presence of her account here in this dissertation is evidence of literatureÕs Òwandering letter.Ó  ShafferÕs words have become flesh and dwell among us.                !%.)!CHAPTER 5 THANKSGIVINGS  So literature [É] can become a harbinger of the possible. (Greene, 1994, p.218)  A Final Echo  There are opportunities in our lives that come around only once, and when we see them, we know them, and we say, ÒYesÓ before they pass us by.   I had one such opportunity quite a few years back, when one February evening my father called me to share some good news: Our family friend, Nelle, had been invited by the University of Notre Dame to receive an honorary degree for her literary accomplishments.  The degree would be bestowed upon her in just a few short months at the annual Commencement ceremonies.  I was delighted, of course, to learn she would be recognized for her work. Delight soon gave way to speechlessness, though, when he followed up with a question: Would I be willing to accompany her to Notre Dame, and throughout the weekend in its entirety? After all, she had no family members in the kind of physical shape it would take to get from Monroeville, Alabama, to South Bend, and she wanted a friendÑpreferably someone familiar with the campusÑto join her.  Few people would decline the invitation to witness, in person, the joyful celebration of a friendÕs accomplishments.  And I dare say nobody would decline the invitation to accompany the one-book-wonder, the woman-turned-enigma by media and critics alike: Nelle Harper Lee.   The weekend was, as I imagined it would be, a bit like a fairytale.  There were shakings of hands with world leaders, politicians, award-winning musicians, and peacemakers.  There were meals that people had planned and sweated over for months.  There was unsurpassed joy in NelleÕs face, as 8,000 hands went up into the air, each holding a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, at the bestowal of her honorary degree. Nelle later remarked, that if I ever looked out on a clear !%.*!night to see an old lady jumping over the moon, I might as well wave.  It would likely be her still reeling with delight.   As we parted ways at the end of the weekend, Nelle handed me a gift.  Over the years, particularly as my experiences as an English teacher, teacher educator, and scholar of English Education have evolved, I have thought more deeply about the gift Nelle handed me that day.  I have often thought about those things she might have given me: an autographed copy of her book perhaps, or some piece of the South, the land we both called home. But she didnÕt.  She gave me a paperback copy of one of her own favorite books, a pen, andÑwith itÑa notecard.  Written upon it were four simple words: ÒDearest Kati, More words.Ó    This story of her gift is, in some ways, a fitting coda to the chapters I have just finished and a helpful beginning to this final chapter: an evocation of Òthanksgivings.Ó  Her handing me the gift of book, pen, and ÒMore wordsÓ was a moment of re-orientation for me, a Ranci‘rian redistribution of the sensible. We had just concluded a weekend celebrating Nelle Harper Lee as author, and, though I had been with her as her friend, I also could not help but see some ÒauthorizingÓ aura about her. Her literary capacities and accomplishments seemed somehow beyond my reach.   But NelleÕs gift said otherwise.  I might argue that, in handing me that book, in combination with pen and a gentle push for ÒMore words,Ó Nelle eluded the distribution of roles and capacities deemed ÒsensibleÓ by the curricular frameworks that govern literary reading.  Her gesture carried a powerful set of assumptionsÑnamely that I came to literary texts already as an active thinking, sensing, experienced human being.  I might do more than de-code a text, or admire its literariness, or ÒunlockÓ the authorÕs meaning, or critically engage with theory.  I might join my own flesh with that pen and find that I had something equally creative to offer.  !%.+!Literary Reading as Gifting  I reference this autobiographical narrative because it serves both as a punctuation mark to the previous chapter, and a framing device for this current and final chapter, where IÕd like to focus on, among other things, the idea of ÒgiftÓ as it relates to literature. Gift, like transubstantiation, can carry with it a sacramental connotation. The words that mark the sacrament of Confirmation are, ÒBe sealed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit.Ó  In matrimony, reconciliation, and baptism, the newly married, reconciled, and baptized are believed to receive the gift of divine grace.  Gift also shares a particularly significant connection with the sacrament of Communion.  The term Eucharist, after all, comes from the Greek word eucharisteo, meaning Òto give thanksÓ for a gift freely given. Three of the four Gospels mention Christ Ògiving thanksÓ while breaking bread with his disciples at the Last Supper, the meal believed to be the institution of the sacrament of Eucharist:   And when He had taken some bread and giving thanks, He broke it and gave it to them  saying, ÔThis is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.Õ (Lk 22:  19, emphasis added) To speak of the Eucharist or Holy Communion, then, is to speak of a kind of thanksgiving for a sacrificial gift.    I would like, in this final chapter, to imagine how it might be that what I have termed literary communion between readers and texts reframes literary reading as a free exchange of gifts between readers and texts.  In doing so, I am imagining how literary texts might ÒofferÓ or ÒgiveÓ of themselves to readers, evoking the idea of text as offering, much like Jimmy Santiago BacaÕs poem, ÒI am offering this poem to you/ Since I have nothing else to give.Ó  But I am also imagining how readers might offer or give of themselves to texts.  That orientation toward !%.,!literature offers one final attempt at deepening my elaboration of literary communion and one final glimpse of reader-text relationships that look and feel different from the instrumental dynamics of the literature curriculum I outlined in Chapter 1.  And so I begin by contemplating the relational dynamics of gifting as a way of unpacking what it might mean to conceive of literature as a free exchange of gifts between readers and texts.    Johnstone (2004), drawing upon phenomenology, has suggested there is a kind of Òdual subjectivityÓ to gifting.  In a more Cartesian set-up where there is a subject-object split, the subject might be assumed to be the source of knowledge and value, while the object is set apart as inert and devoid of value until acted upon by the subject.  In many ways, pedagogical misappropriations of reader response theoriesÑlike those I outlined in Chapter 3Ñenact this kind of subject-object binary.  Recall, for example, from Chapter 3 how reader response pedagogy often privileges the readerÕs subjectively-felt response over the textual object.    An alternative subject-object relationship, still Cartesian in its division of subject and object, might impose the object on the subject, reducing the subject to passive receiver.  This relational dynamic is one that Rosenblatt worked to overcome by balking the notion that the text somehow impressed its meaning upon the reader.  And yet, there is a degree to which formalism, which I discussed in Chapter 1, preserves this imposition of the text upon the reader, where the reader is beholden to decoding only that which is somehow ÒcontainedÓ within the four corners of the text.  Even literatureÕs more critical frameworks that purport to be emancipatory seem to ride on an assumed relationship between reader and text very much in the spirit of this Cartesian split.  The reader remains a passive receiver of text until she possesses an authorizing theory.     In a framework of gifting, on the other hand, there is, claims Johnstone, a kind of equality of subject.  His framework of gifting is one of Òdual subjectivity:Ó The giver is subject, the !%.-!receiver is subject, and the object is the giving and receiving together with the entity which is given (p.5).  If we conceive of literary reading as an act of giftingÑas dual subjects reader and text giving and receiving togetherÑthen there is, from the outset, an overcoming of the separateness of reader and text in more hierarchical models of literary instrumentalism.  This overcoming of separateness of reader and text is in sync, I believe, with this projectÕs unifying metaphor: literary communion.  Reflecting back   IÕd like to use JohnstoneÕs analysis of the relationships implied in gifting to revisit Chapters 3 and 4.  I would like not only to summarize these earlier chapters as a concluding chapter should do, but also to re-see parts of those chapters as speaking to a kind of dual subjectivity of reader and text always already giving and receiving together.  In Chapter 3, for example, I shared DanÕs account of reading Chapter 23 of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  I shared that account as a way of illuminating how conceiving of literature as grounded not only in experience, but also in equality, might mend the bifurcation of reader response and formalism.  DanÕs account inspired a kind of reimagining of close reading different from that of the New Critical tradition intent on ÒunlockingÓ the authorÕs meaning, and different also from the now standardized version of Òread[ing] closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from itÓ (NGA, 2010, p.10).  His reading, I argued, was a kind of dwelling in the gaps between language and experience, where through his own intermingling of feeling, experience, and imagination with the textÕs formal qualities, he participated in a dimension of becoming-ness bigger than himself.    There are ways in which this entrance into what I called a kind of communion with text positioned Dan and the text Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as dual subjects, giving !%%.!and receiving together.  Dan, for example, gave his own imagination to the text.  His own visions of gum wrappers stashed in some corner of NevilleÕs bedroom increased the depth of RonÕs hoarseness, of HarryÕs glumness, of HermioneÕs tearfulness at the end of that heartbreaking scene in Chapter 23.  DanÕs aching raised the decibels in RonÕs voice as he asked Neville, ÒWhat are you doing here?Ó   And yet Dan also received that which the text itself gave: a linguistic rendition of an experience that Òone takes to be universal,Ó yet that has Ònever been precisely articulated beforeÓ (Bingham and Biesta, 2010, p.68).  The dramatic irony, the artful arrangement of dialogue, the gradual paring down of syntax to underscore the speechlessness of the young wizards as they process what they have just witnessed were all offerings.  They were outgrowths of RowlingÕs willingness to dwell in the gaps between language and experience, patiently trying on ways to say things that she knew could never be fully said.     As I attempted to make clear in Chapter 4, this giving and receiving is not meant to be interpreted as linking, in some pre-programmed way, the textÕs manner of making with the readerÕs manner of reception. The very idea of ÒgiftingÓ connotes a kind of freedom from reciprocity.  Here, again, I find JohnstoneÕs elaboration of the idea of gifting illuminating:   The notion of ÒgiftÓ implies a relationship both to the one who gives and to the one to  whom it is given.  One cannot give a gift unless what is given belongs to one as giver;  while to give a gift to another, means that it now belongs to that other, or that the other  has the gift.  But to have something, means that the receiver may freely use (uti) and  enjoy (frui) what is given as she wills.  ThusÉa gift is not something given Òwith strings  attached,Ó it is not a disguised form of controlling the other, but a freeing of the other for  enjoyment of the gift received. (p.13)  !%%%!JohnstoneÕs imagery of gifting as a kind of giving with Òno strings attachedÓ calls to mind Ranci‘reÕs theorizing of the aesthetic regime as, among other things, an untying of the knot between poiesis and aesthesis.  To conceive of the text as gift is to imagine the reader freely using and enjoying the text as she wills.  It is not the expectation that she de-code the textÕs meaning, that she logically infer what the text says, or that she admire the authorÕs masterful command of language.  To conceive of text as gift is to understandÑindeed hope--that the reader might flesh it out as she sees fit, in a way comparable to MargieÕs fleshing out of Equus as a kind of mantra by which to live.  The readerÕs fleshing out the text is, one might argue, a kind of sacrificial giving of the reader to the text.  As Roland Barthes noted, readers Òrewrite the text of the work with the text of [their] livesÓ (1985, p.101).  There is a tradition, too, in Western culture of ÒgiftingÓ literature to people we care about.  Not surprisingly, a few of my research participantsÕ accounts were about literary texts that had originated as gifts from teachers and significant others.  If, as Johnstone asserts, Òone cannot give a gift unless what is given belongs to one as giver,Ó then it would seem to follow that somewhere along the way, readers have left a piece of themselves in the texts they gift to others.  Even works of literature themselves have made similar intimations.  Among the characters in Alice WalkerÕs Temple of My Father are a husband and wife, both avid readers.  Any text that the husband read that was important to him, his wife made a point to read also, because she saw it as an extension of him.  And any text she read that was important to her, she shared with her husband.  However, her husband never read the books she shared with him, and with each addition to the pile of unread books on his desk, it was as if a piece of her diedÑsuffocating between closed book covers. This idea of reader and text giving and receiving together is again consistent with the more sacramental notion of communion that brings about !%%&!what has been described as a kind of Òmutual abidingÓ (CCC, 1349).  Reader and text echo to some extent another line from JohnÕs Gospel often invoked in Catholic Christian teaching to elaborate the relational dimensions of communion: ÒAbide in me, and I in youÓ (Jn 15:4).  Literary Communion as Risk-Taking  This idea of gifting--of a literary text giving to a receptive reader what belongs uniquely to it and a reader giving to a receptive text what belongs uniquely to her--is one that seems to elude a distribution of competencies and roles deemed ÒsensibleÓ in the literature curriculumÕs more rational-instrumental frameworks. Recall from Chapter 1 that literatureÕs more traditional curricular frames thrive on the stability of relations between and among people (teachers, students, published authors), objects (texts), and modes of perception and signification (favoring rational knowledge as the primary mode of ÒsensingÓ).  I outlined those predictable, stable relations in Chapter 1, noting how literature is often mediated by knowledge and taken up for knowledge.  Readers function primarily as analysts of texts, which remain the products of someone elseÕsÑthe authorÕsÑcreative capacities.  Teachers assume the authority to mediate a readerÕs analytic interpretation and/or judge its validity.  But there is little that is predictable or stable about literary communion and its openness to a kind of Òno strings attachedÓ gifting between readers and texts.  Gifting, Johnstone reminds us, is  Ònot a disguised form of controlling the other,Ó and so conceiving of literary reading as reader and text giving and receiving together poses a challenge to the policing mechanisms of literatureÕs more rational-instrumental curricular frameworks.    In the previous two chapters, I have focused almost exclusively on the reader and text in my attempts to elaborate literary communion.  But Biesta (2013) has described what he calls the !%%'!Òbeautiful riskÓ of education, and it seems that literary communion poses what might be a beautiful risk for all who are implicated in the literature curriculumÑteachers included.  The ÒproductsÓ of literary communion defy measurement, and they have a way of manifesting themselves across a lifespan, not just within the artificial constraints of a 16- or 32-week course. MargieÕs story illustrates this, and my own story illustrates this. IndiaÕs storyÑnot yet sharedÑillustrates this characteristic of literary communion as well.    For India, it was Mark MathabaneÕs Kaffir Boy--his autobiographical account of growing up in South AfricaÑthat, as she said, Òbecame a book that would forever live insideÓ her.  She read it in high school, while attending an elite boarding school on the West CoastÑa context that seemed significant in light of the parts of MathabaneÕs book that moved her the most profoundly.  The gruesome details of MathabaneÕs struggles for education ÒjarredÓ her, she said, from any complacency about her own educational opportunities.  But it was really not until 4 years later that Kaffir Boy began to leave any semblance of a detectable trail in her life.  Presented with a fellowship application opportunity, India not only seized the opportunity to write her way through the application, but also used passages of MathabaneÕs autobiography to do so.  Her essay earned her the funding to travel to South Africa the following summer to participate in a nature education program, and, in the years since, she had returned two more times to teach and participate in the African Leadership Academy.    For teachers of literature, ÒoutcomesÓ of literary reading that manifest themselves 3 months, 4 years, and 32 years beyond a course serve no utility in the realm of teacher accountability, and so to patiently await these fruitsÑthat may only ever exist as possibilitiesÑis indeed a beautiful risk.  MargieÕs story of reading Equus and my own story of reading The Diaries of Adam and Eve serve as reminders that there may be few things about literary !%%(!communion that a teacher gets credit for within the confines of a single academic semester.  My grandfatherÕs eulogy did not factor into Tom WergeÕs course evaluations.  Neither MargieÕs divorce, nor her poetry counted in ArthurÕs tenure files.  No teacher at IndiaÕs school received credit for her travels and work throughout South Africa.    The stories of reading that I have used to deepen my elaboration of literary communion suggest that literary communion poses a kind of risk for readers as well.   A rational-instrumental frameworkÕs more fixed, hierarchical order depends, in part, on readersÑeven under the label of Òclose readingÓ--maintaining a safe, almost detective-like distance from the text.  The curricular materials of these more instrumental framesÑmaterials like comprehension and interpretation questions that demand analysis and summaryÑoperate Òwithin the four corners of the textÓ (Coleman and Pimental, 2012), fostering an illusion of stability and control.  To analyze and summarize is, in effect, to describe what is.  But the accounts that I have used to deepen my elaboration of literary communion speak to literatureÕs participation in a kind of intervention.  Readers, as I have already mentioned, enter into and dwell in the gaps between language and experienceÑgaps that analysis and summary are more quick to gloss over. And when readers intermingle with the text in that way, literature, it seems, does more than emanate meaning, convey ideas, or garner appreciation.  It actually exhibits a potential to intervene on life.  It begins to Òlive under [our] skin,Ó as Margie attests.  DanÕs tears, MargieÕs divorce, IndiaÕs newly-formed ties to South Africa were all signs of the impossibility in literary communion of things remaining what they once were.  I would be remiss, of course, if I did not also acknowledge the possibility of literary communion posing risks that are far from beautifulÑindeed downright dangerous. I have discussed emancipatory reading as a kind of reading in which readers are themselves free to play !%%)!with texts, reinvent texts, seize texts and form new texts of their own.  And the notion of text as gift, as I have already mentioned, implies an assumed freedom on the part of the reader to do with it as she feels moved to do.  Of course, there is nothing to guarantee that a readerÕs Òfleshing outÓ a text will operate in the best interest of others.  There is nothing to guarantee that the new texts she composes with the text before her will not be used to do harm.  As Willinsky (1991) reminds us, Òtime in the company of great writers can certainly fail usÓ (p.68), andÑas an extreme example of this failureÑhe cites the work of George Steiner (1967) who has documented the high literary taste of many a concentration camp worker in Nazi Germany.  ÒI find myself unable to assert confidently that the humanities humanize,Ó wrote Steiner (p.68).  SteinerÕs research on the links between Nazism and literature serve as a reminder that Ranci‘reÕs ethical framework might spur the imagination of relationships between readers and texts grounded in equality, but it cannot guarantee the morality of those who comprise the relationship, nor can it guarantee the goodness of intentions that undergird their Òfleshing outÓ of texts.  A Matter of Faith  Wherever there is risk or uncertainty, there seems a need for faith.  In his letter of response to my own Òthank youÓ for having introduced me to TwainÕs Diaries of Adam and Eve, Tom Werge reminded me that ÒAll the rest comes down to faith, hope, and love.Ó And perhaps he was right.  Perhaps this project itself comes down to faith, hope, and love.  There are certainly ways to read my elaboration of literary communion as a kind of soul-searching question: ÒWhat are youÑas teacher, as reader, as curriculum designer-- faithful to?Ó   Applebee (1993) implied a similar question at the conclusion of his report on the state of literature in the secondary school: !%%*! As we begin a second century of teaching literature, it is time we examine these enduring  characteristics of literature instruction, asking which are appropriate and essential and  which have continued because they have remained unexamined. (p.203) Recent trends in the secondary English language arts curriculum, such as the marginalization and the instrumentalization of literature, posit a faithfulness to the goods of a knowledge economy (Machlup, 1972), among them skills, ideas, measureable knowledge.  The resurging emphasis on close reading in official U.S. curricular documents like the Common Core State Standards also hints at a kind of faithfulness to that which the New Critics found admirable about formalism: its rigorous and codified method for the literature curriculum.    But literary communionÑimagined within a Ranci‘rian ethical frameworkÑexhibits faithfulness to other things.  Chief among those things is a faithfulness to equality as already. This faithfulness to equality as already triggers its own doubts, among them a doubt in blind, ÒunexaminedÓ (Applebee, p.203) faith in curricular traditions that perpetuate inequality.  Out of a faithfulness to equality as already, one begins to examine more critically overly text-centric or overly reader-centric patterns of a literature curriculum.  One begins to examine more critically the ways that literature might serve as a channel by which to impart knowledge that readers presumably lack, or the ways that this investment in imparting knowledge treats certain kinds of knowledge as presumably superior to other kinds.   And finally, one begins to imagine how literary reading might be otherwise: how it can be, at times, and under certain assumptions, more sacramental than instrumental.    Because equality as already functions as an ethical lens, there is really no method by which to arrive at literary communion.  It happens, by virtue of the unmediated relationship between reader and text as assumed equals, in ways that are not controlledÑindeed not even !%%+!anticipatable.  There may be conditions more conducive to literary communion than others.  For example, it is conceivable that a reader may be less likely to commune with a literary text that is more overtly didactic in its language.  After all, in a text that draws more direct lines between language and experience there may be less space for the reader to do her own imagining, playing, and reinventing.  Still, though, these are only ÒmightsÓ and Òmays.Ó Without a method and a definitive set of sufficient conditions, the teacher who values literary communion and remains open to it must herself be a faithful person by virtue of investing in a phenomenon that cannot be guaranteed.     I made the explicit point in Chapter 1 that I had not set out in this project to prove that literary communion exists in the world.  Rather, having become aware of when and how relationships between readers and texts perpetuate inequality, I set out to imagine how a relationship of equality might be different.  Again, full of faith that some of my own experiences with literature had been different from the experiences conjured up in a more rational-instrumental framework, I began with my own experiences, and then the experiences of others, to theorize literary communion as one such possibility.    The stories woven throughout this dissertation, then, have served to help imagine literary communion as an alternative to more rational-instrumental literature frameworks, not to prove what literary communion is.  They have highlighted those things that a lens of equality invites into the curricular frame that might otherwise remain invisible or inaudible.  In essence, they point to moments and signs that anyone open to the possibility of literary communion might consider more keenly attending to.   It is possible that these accounts redistribute the sensible--not only in their reimagining of close reading, reader response, and emancipatory frameworks for literature instructionÑbut in the way they redirect English teachersÕ faith. These accounts !%%,!suggest that teachers might place their faith in certain practices, activities, and even silences that might, in more rational-instrumental frameworks, be more easily passed over in the English language arts classroom.  I outline some of these practices, activities, and silences below.     Listening for the music   I discussed in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 3, the pervasiveness of formalism in English classrooms throughout the U.S. and the degree to which the literature curriculum has concerned itself primarily with students learning to analyze an authorÕs craft.  ApplebeeÕs (1993) findingÑthat Òliterary analysis was the primary focus in literature courses: close, objective, and text-centeredÓ (p.125)Ñcontinues to hold true with the emphasis on close reading in U.S. standards documents.    Brian Doyle, a professional writer andÑlike meÑa former student of Tom Werge, posits that there is something to be gained in asking questions outside the frame of textual analysis.  The Òdeeper educationÓ might unfold, Doyle contends, in response to the question, ÒWhat music does the text get going in ourselves?Ó  Reflecting on his own experience in Tom WergeÕs seminar, Doyle concluded that Werge had figured out ÒIt was easy enough to pick apart the craft of the thing, to identify the tools that had been wielded by a brilliant man from Missouri in service to laughter and fury and rage and reverence.Ó  Having made that discovery, Werge built a course around what he perceived as the source of the most powerful reading experiences: Òwriting that is about the reader, that takes up residence in the country of her heart, that speaks to his innermost self, É that shivers, and rattles, and rivets.Ó      In most English classrooms, out of faithfulness to the craft of the text and the skills of analysis, teachers listen for the keenness of a readerÕs interpretation.  However, accounts like MargieÕs reading of Equus, or DanÕs reading of Harry Potter, or my own reading of The Diaries !%%-!of Adam and Eve lend a legitimacy to the question, ÒWhat music does this text get going in the readerÕs soul?Ó As a result, they invite teachers to listen not only for the keenness of a readerÕs analysis, but for the musicÑperhaps the Òrhythmic architectureÓ (Smith, p.21) of a readerÕs voice sharing a particularly moving, shivering, riveting, or rattling passage.    Embracing the absence of words   Words, it seems, are the dominant currency of the literature curriculum.  They are the ÒstuffÓ that literary texts are made of, and ApplebeeÕs (1993) study of the secondary literature curriculum revealed a prevalence of word-based response to literature:  oral discussions, careful line-by-line analysis, answers to comprehension questions.  Words seem to function as the primary products of the literature curriculum, in that they are the means by which to measure studentsÕ mastery of ideas, critical capacities, or analytical prowess.    I do not wish to undermine the value of words, but I do wish to underscore that which is posited by many of the lived accounts of reading throughout this project: that the language of literature can sometimes be wordless. MargieÕs poem is a reminder that the literary works a reader finds most moving are sometimes those for which there are no words. Her poem reframes, as generative, those moments in a discussion or a paper where a reader struggles to find the right words.  DanÕs account suggests that the moments in a literature discussion that drip with a ÒfleshierÓ language like tears are perhaps the moments to run withÑnot the moments to quickly pass over in pursuit of the reader with the more coherent answer.   Allowing literature to beget literature  These accounts also give English educators pause to consider the kinds of words asked for in the literature classroom.  If the language of literature is sometimes wordless, if occasionally there really are no words with which to talk about the works that move a reader !%&.!most, then perhaps it is worthwhile to ask readers not to produce analytical prose in response to literature, but to dwellÑas writersÑin the gaps between language and experience.  Perhaps in the English language arts classroom, readers might respond to literature with their own literature.  It is no coincidence that the readers I interviewed for this project shared with me their accounts of reading in a more narrative mode.  Their narratives and MargieÕs Equus-inspired poetry serve as examples of the kinds of writing in response to literature that might come to find a more prominent place in the literature curriculum of the English language arts classroom.   Giving Thanks   In the Catholic Mass, the congregation, nearing the end of the Eucharistic prayer, proclaims in unison: ÒIt is right to give thanks.Ó That actÑgiving thanksÑseems a fitting one with which to end my own elaborations of literary communion.  I have just completed what might best be termed a ÒtheoryÓ for the literature curriculum.  In his concluding remarks to his nation-wide study of the literature curriculum in secondary schools, Applebee (1993) remarked, ÒIf we are to shift the emphasis in instruction from the teacher and the text toward the studentÉthen we need a much clearer set of theoretical principles to guide instructionÓ (p.201).  The field of English Education, argued Applebee, had yet to come up with a coherent theory to guide the literature curriculum.  Drawing on both New Critical text-oriented traditions and reader response theoryÕs reader-centered traditions, teachers made a Òpractical compromiseÓ that resulted in an ÒeclecticismÓ that Òproduce[d] tensions and inconsistenciesÓ rather than a Òcoherent and integrated approachÓ (pp. 201-202).  My hope is that literary communionÑimagined through a lens of equalityÑmight resolve the tensions and inconsistencies in what has often been a severance of reader from text in the literature curriculum.   Reimagining close reading in a way that mends the bifurcation of reader response and formalism seems a step in the !%&%!right direction in resolving those tensions and inconsistencies. So too does a reframing of literary reading as dual subjectsÑreader and text--giving and receiving together  Of course, as Willinsky observes, Òto change some part of the approach to literatureÉis to shake the set of disturbing ideas about power and authorityÓ (p.15).  And indeed, with Ranci‘rian equality as this projectÕs unifying lens, it would be difficult to claim that the significance of a theory of literary communion is limited only to the literature curriculum.  For Ranci‘re, the primary goal of an analysis of the literature curriculum would be to determine what kind of world it defines and whether it is a world founded on equality.  As it turns out, the world defined by rational instrumental frameworksÑeven those like critical frameworks that claim to be emancipatoryÑis a world that perpetuates inequality.  What literary communion offers, then, is not just one alternative vision for the literature curriculum grounded in ethics, but renewed faith in what Maxine Greene asserted for an audience of English Educators many years ago: that ÒliteratureÉmight be a harbinger of the possibleÓ Ð the ÒpossibleÓ of an education that proceeds from equality as already.   Bingham (2011) has argued that education has reached what he calls a ÒcrossroadsÓ moment:  a moment of hyper-curricularization, where the assumption is that anything thinkable can be ÒpackagedÓ (p.515) as knowledge and transmitted to learners via language. Literature, it seems, is no exception to this trend.  In an age when anyone can simply jump online and Òwatch, practice, learn almost anythingÑfor free,Ó (p.516) educationÑin order to remain relevantÑmust begin to orient itself around something more than the transmission and construction of knowledge. Education must live out its relational role, its Òcrucial human role of drawing people togetherÓ (p.516).  Literary communion takes seriously this relational role.  It is, after all, the fruit of imagining how relationships of equality between readers and literary texts might be !%&&!different from the relationships of more rational-instrumental frameworks that perpetuate inequality.   It is right, I think, to give thanks to Ranci‘re for a notion of equality replete with possibility.  But I must also give thanks to teachers like Tom Werge and texts like The Diaries of Adam and Eve that convinced me long ago that there were depths and dimensions and relationships to reading with which the K-12 English language arts curriculum could do more, or perhaps otherwise.  I give thanks to Margie and Dan and Lisa and India and Jane for their stories that renewed my faith in my own literary reading experiences.  I give thanks to them for adding more depth and dimension and nuance to the possibilities that might exist for literary reading.  I give thanks to authors like Pat Conroy and J.K. Rowling and Mark Mathabane who had the faith to release their texts into the world like a breath that becomes air.  The stories and passages that appear throughout this project are proof that readers somewhere have returned them to breath.  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