Reclaiming Literature: A Teacher’s Dilemma

Reclaiming Literature is designed to give its readers the capability to grasp a novel adequately enough to teach it. Seven classic American novels are examined: Moby-Dick, The Portrait of a Lady, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Turn of the Screw, The Red Badge of Courage, A Farewell to Arms, and The Catcher in the Rye. Each of these novels has brought forth from its many readers a multitude of contradictory responses, not simply to different aspects of the novel, but to the most basic experience it conveys.

Teachers face an intensifying need to present these works to their classes and resolve that critical confusion. When they turn for help to literary theorists, the confusion is compounded. Theorists have moved away from the primary text to dwell upon and give value to each reader’s response to that text, however variant or contradictory it might be. This approach ignores, if not denies, the author’s specifically crafted accomplishment. Glasser shows how teachers and general readers can reclaim each literary work from the current critical confusion. To grasp each of these novels firmly enough to teach it, teachers must focus upon each author in the act of practicing the fiction writer’s craft. This is essential reading for teachers of literature from secondary school onward, and for general readers of literature.