Abstract
The first section of this article addresses the relationship between reader response and culture. The second section consists of portraits of a teacher and her students as they navigated their way through a series of African American literary texts. Most of my remarks focus on Virginia Hamilton's House of Dies Drear (1968) because the reading of this text marked a turning point for the teacher and students I observed. The portraits are drawn from a study which sought to explore the cultural dimensions of reader response among poor and working-class African American and European American high school students (Spears-Bunton, 1989). Ethnographic data including class observations and interviews were collected from a single eleventh-grade honors English class of 28 students for six months. The school in which the data were collected serves two neighborhoods-one mostly African American, the other mostly European American-with a history of racially motivated animosity between them. All subject names used in this article are pseudonyms.
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