Reflective Reading and the Power of Narrative

Reflective Reading and the Power of Narrative: Producing the Reader is an interdisciplinary exploration into the profound power of narratives to create-and recreate-how we imagine ourselves. It posits that the process of producing a text also produces the reader.

Karyn Sproles is the author of Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (2006). She is currently the director of the Center for Teaching & Learning at the United States Naval Academy, where she also teaches in the English Department.

Part I. Why We Need Stories and the Stability of the Subject 1. Quilted Quotations and the Pleasure of the Text 2. Reflective Reading: Beyond Reader-Response to the Unconscious of Reading 3. Out Classed: The Family Romance as Fantasy of Upward Mobility 4. To Write a Different Story: Reflective Reading as a Pedagogical Practice of Restorative Justice for Racial Oppression Part II. History as Méconaissance 5. Modernist Biography and Méconnaissance: The Bloomsbury Group's Oedipal Resolution 6. The Quilting Point: Vita Sackville-West's Secular Joan of Arc Part. III Narrative Instability 7. Reflective Reading, Faith, and Transformation in Susan Howatch's Church of England Novels 8. Walking Contradiction: Johnny Cash and the Instability of the Subject 9. Depicting the Undepictable: The Reflective Analysis of Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? Afterword: A Twisted Wrench and a Sunbonnet Quilt