How Feeling Supports Students’ Interpretive Discussions About Literature

Research indicates that feeling is fundamental to the multilayered experience of literary interpretation. However, despite great strides in U.S. high school classrooms, discussions about literature are still often characterized by known-answer discourses that exclude feeling. This article builds on small-scale studies of affective evaluation, an interpretive approach in which readers attend to and reflect on their feeling-based responses to texts. Those studies, focused on individual students, showed that when responding to texts with feeling, students were more likely to build multilayered interpretations as opposed to summary or one-dimensional thematic interpretations. The current study explores affective evaluation in the more complex arena of class discussion, where known-answer discourses are particularly entrenched. We compared the same teachers and students using affective evaluation in one discussion, but not the other. Discussions using affective evaluation were correlated with increased multidimensional interpretation, adding to evidence that feeling enriches students’ literary sense-making and disrupts known-answer discourses.