"When veteran English professor and internationally renowned scholar Jerome Klinkowitz appraised his own education from grade school through graduate school, he was singularly unimpressed. Nor was he enamored with the miserable job literature faculties are doing today. Seeking radical change, he elected not to follow blindly down the well-trodden pedagogical path, which, he understood, could lead only to the slaughter of his students' love of literature.".

"Drawing on his own experience in the profession, Klinkowitz sorts out the wrong ways of teaching literature before devising a new, successful method. Specifically, he concludes that a historically based "story of English" is precisely the wrong narrative approach to making sense of what literature does. Instead, Klinkowitz proposes a new method focused not on the product of literary writing but on the process of writing.

Long involved with the making of contemporary literature, Klinkowitz shows how his classroom approach draws on the same strengths and inspirations writers use in the creation of literature. He involves students in the literary work as production."--BOOK JACKET.