Education and the study of literature

This reflective essay argues that a major constraint on the effective teaching of literature in elementary and high schools is the challenge of articulating and empirically validating a model of literary reasoning that encompasses the following: (1) the multiple dimensions of the literary experience and how they interact (cognitive, emotional, dispositional, personal introspective, aesthetic, experiential); (2) developmental issues and trajectories impacting the growth of expertise in literary response; (3) the multiple sources of knowledge on which readers draw in responding to literature (knowledge of text structures, of rhetorical conventions, of literary traditions, of real world correlates to character types and motivations, settings, and events, and of moral and philosophical domains, including cultural variation among these). Articulating and validating such a model will require interdisciplinary collaborations across fields ranging from cognition, human development, linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory.