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This paper argues the need to develop in students and their teachers a more critical awareness of literature as a discipline, training its subjects in ways of reading, writing and talking about their own experiences and the worlds they inhabit in terms which may be detrimental to their own best interests. Literary education in recent years, except at the most advanced levels, has been most influenced by the reader response paradigm which, still assumes a liberal humanist model of communication. Critical Awareness of literature should move beyond the excesses of both an overly pessimistic view of determined 'subjects of literature' (after Althusser, Eagleton) but also (after Gilbert, 1987, 1989, 1994) beyond the R/romantic simplicities of 'spontaneous personal response' and the like (Rosenblatt, Iser), to a cautious but fundamentally optimistic examination of the possibilities indicated by resistant critical readings (Giroux, 1983). If Literary Awareness is to make any advance upon current practices and beliefs, it must be founded upon fully defensible models of language and communication, and should promote students' investigations of how texts come to mean, and where 'responses', not to mention 'literature', come from.
