In teaching, instruction can focus on literary works as storehouses of emotion that can serve as models of how to communicate emotions to the self and others. To help students identify and articulate what they feel as they read Victorian novels, one instructor asked students to record their emotions in a journal divided with quotes on one side of the page and reactions on the other. His first goal was to identify a range of feelings, but he asked for other responses as well: self-esteem issues in the text and in the reader; personal associations, especially family memories; awareness of family dynamics in the text; and functional and dysfunctional interactions as defined by family systems theory (the primary approach in alcoholism treatment). The students coded their journals for each of the features, counted the number of entries in each category when the novel was completed and charted their progress. As a result of this emotional approach to literature, the instructor was awarded a second teaching fellowship and was asked by the campus counseling center to make presentations on literature as therapy in its outreach programs. Meanwhile, his courses in literature continued to evolve--in a course description from 1990, emotional literacy is set in the context of brain hemisphericity research, and family systems theory is delineated more explicitly. (TB)