Making Literature Matter

Students respond powerfully to literature when it explores issues that matter to them, such as how love can be compromised by the demands of tradition, how authoritarian injustice can be resisted, and how popular culture influences behavior. And when students learn to analyze and argue for how literature engages such issues and exerts such power, they develop and hone their critical thinking and writing skills.

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In its fifth edition Making Literature Matter continues to deliver on the promise of its title. Its thematic anthology gathers memorable stories, poems, plays, and essays into unique literary clusters addressing issues that rouse passionate responses in students. At the same time, its comprehensive rhetoric shows students how to harness those responses into thoughtful arguments about the issues raised by the clusters and the literature. Read the preface.

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This anthology is now available with video! Learn more about VideoCentral for Literature.

John Schilb (Ph.D., State University of New York — Binghamton) is a professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he holds the Culbertson Chair in Writing. Currently the editor of College English, he has co-edited Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age and, with John Clifford, Writing Theory and Critical Theory. He is author of Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory and Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations.

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John Clifford (Ph.D., New York University) is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Editor of The Experience of Reading: Louis Rosenblatt and Reader-Response Theory, he has published numerous scholarly articles on pedagogy, critical theory and composition theory, most recently in College English, in Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers and in The Norton Book of Composition Studies.