PART I. WHY WE READ
Introduction: The University, the Humanities, and the Province of Literature
Helen Vendler, What We Have Loved, Others Will Love
Gerald Graff, Disliking Books at an Early Age
Terry Eagleton, The Rise of English
Guari Viswanathan, Introduction to Masks of Conquest
Paulo Freire, The "Banking" Concept of Education
bell hooks, Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy
Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New Advocacy and the Old
Richard Ohmann, The Function of English at the Present Time
Simon During, Teaching Culture
Louis Menand, The Demise of Disciplinary Authority
Robert Scholes, A Fortunate Fall?
PART II. WHAT WE READ
Introduction: The Literary Canon and the Curriculum after the Culture Wars
Jane Tompkins, Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne's Literary Reputation
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value
Lillian S. Robinson, Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is a Minor Literature?
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to the Told
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, From Epistemology of the Closet
Edward W. Said, The Politics of Knowledge
Janice Radway, Introduction to A Feeling for Books
Alan Purves, Telling Our Story about Teaching Literature
John Guillory, The Canon as Cultural Capital
Harold Bloom, Elegiac Conclusion
PART III. HOW WE READ
Introduction: Interpretive Communities and Literary Meaning
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author
Peter Rabinowitz, Actual Reader and Authorial Reader
Stanley Fish, How to Recognize a Poem When You See One
Reed Way Dasenbrock, Do We Write the Text We Read?
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Female Swerve
Toril Moi, From Sexual/Textual Politics
Annette Kolodny, Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism
Toni Morrison, Black Matter(s)
Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa
Wilson Harris, The Frontier on Which Heart of Darkness Stands
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperialism and Sexual Difference
Wayne C. Booth, Who Is Responsible in Ethical Criticism, and for What?
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Literary Imagination
Herbert F. Tucker, Wanted Dead or Alive: Browning's Historicism
George Levine, Reclaiming the Aesthetic
Michael Bérubé, Aesthetics and the Literal Imagination
Appendix
Index