Reviews children's literature with multi-dimensional, engaging characters--characters with strengths and weaknesses who grapple with real problems and find real solutions. (MG)

Responds to "A Symposium on the Usefulness of Literacy Research" in the same issue of this journal. Maintains that Alan Purves totally misreads the author's theory of reading approaches. Explains that "efferent reading" and "aesthetic reading" are not discrete categories but terms on a continuum. (TB)

Describes aspects of bibliotherapy (the use of books to help children and adolescents cope with emotional problems): its history, what it is, its processes, techniques in administering it, implementation precautions, its limitations, and studies of bibliotherapy. (SR)

Engages in ironic play with the confessional mode to find out how to think and talk after the French feminist confrontation with philosophy. Confesses a desire for philosophic thinking, then seeks from hermeneutics the secret at the heart of its enterprise. (SR)

Traces an encounter with Mikhail Bakhtin during the process of reading and writing a dissertation. Refocuses attention from "Bakhtin" as authoritative text to the reader. Reappropriates Bakhtin in service of a feminist practice of reading. (SR)

Reiterates some of the major tenets of reader-response theory. Describes the "writerly" text as a source of activity rather than of meaning, and examines Gary Paulsen's "The Winter Room" as an example of the active writerly text. (SR)

Finds that the updating of situation models is achieved by accessing both locational and temporal links in the knowledge-based spatial representation. (SR)

Offers a Pyrrhonist reading of "Hamlet." Describes an experiment in teaching that attempts to reconstruct for literature students the prudential-ethical context of human rhetoric, placing "prudentia," or practical wisdom, at the center of their own imaginative involvement. (PRA)

Argues that the accidents of reading a hypertext (changing your destination, forgetting your point of departure, or getting lost along the way) are not the effects of inappropriate cues, misinterpreted reference or poor design, but the general condition of the hypertext as text, amplified by the narrative turns of the link. (SR)

Explores themes relating to human transition as they appear in "Charlotte's Web" and four other stories using pigs as a subject. Discusses the motifs common to all these texts that recur in the film "Babe." Considers how the cycle of life and death is ceaseless, and pigs symbolize the necessary transitions that people must all…

Examines whether readers' perceptions of online news stories varies as a function of source attribution in those stories. Finds that they rated stories with quotes significantly higher in credibility and quality than identical stories without quotes; but that quotes did not affect liking for (and representativeness or newsworthiness of) online…

This brief article uses a weaving metaphor to address the relationship between braille and reading, with prior knowledge (the warp threads) interacting with reading content (the weft threads) by means of braille (the shuttle). Reading is seen to be an interactive process between reader, text, and the context of the reading situation. (DB)

Describes "character maps," an activity that draws upon the reader's prior knowledge of people to understand a book's characters. Includes a brief list of additional activities and extensions to reinforce comprehension through characterization. (RS)

In this article, the author redefines "text" and "poem" so that attention will be focused on the reader. The text, she argues, lies inert on the page until the reader comes along and brings it to life in the act of reading, reacting, and reflecting. A poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or an ideal entity. It is…

There is an abundance of theory concerning the effects of reading literature. Some researchers do reveal effects, but few explain them. When they do, the textual features examined are neither necessary nor sufficient for literariness. Three experiments are presented here that study the relation between literary text quality and literary reading…