Making Literature Matter

Prepared by editors whose scholarship fuses literary and composition studies, Making Literature Matter combines a comprehensive writing text with a uniquely organized anthology for introductory literature courses that emphasize critical and academic writing.

What makes literature matter?

Writing about it — argumentatively. The writing text helps students learn to analyze literature and develop responsible and persuasive claims about it — making it matter to them as it hasn’t before.

Reading it — when it explores issues that matter. The stories, poems, plays and essays in the anthology are uniquely organized into thematic clusters focusing on life issues that speak to students and evoke their engaged response.

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. 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.

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.