guages have greatly improved as a result of pedagogical and linguistic research. Many teachers now stress student-centered approaches that seek to encourage individual participation, take into account the needs, interests, and desires of students, and focus on the development of communicative skills. Indeed, research has shown that such humanistic approaches motivate students to continue language study, prepare them for the type of communication they would experience in the target culture, and have implications that transcend the classroom. Yet, while undergraduate language enrollments seem to be increasing, fewer students now choose to study second-language literatures. Several educators suggest that the way the academy presents literature may be one of the reasons for the decline over the past decade, and that strengthening the teaching of literature is the next major issue in our profession.1 In many classrooms, the teaching of literature has remained traditional with emphasis on teacher text-centered approaches like lectures, surveys, biographical summaries, and text analyses with occasional discussions. In such cases literary texts continue to be taught as finished products, to be unilaterally decoded, analyzed, and explained (Kramsch: p. 356). While such approaches may be appropriate and effective at the advanced or graduate level as part of a student's professional training, and important to a complete understanding of literature, they may result in frustration and a lack of response and interest on the part of the non-specialist (Lohnes: pp. 84-86). Such approaches tend to minimize student participation and thus fail to capitalize fully on the educational and motivational benefits to be gained from experiential learning and from the integration of student reactions into the teaching/ learning situation (Birckbichler & Muyskens: p. 23). They also fail to consider the linguistic limitations and lack of critical or analytical skills of students who may feel unequipped to overcome the difficulty of a text and for whom the foreign literature course may become a painful lesson in deciphering (Santoni: p. 434). As Scher (56) observes: Most of our undergraduates do not really know how to read literature as a work of art and lack not only the prerequisites of experience but also the technical vocabulary and critical concepts with which to define that experience. Thus, she asserts, we unfairly blame our students for difficulties that essentially stem from our own methodological weaknesses and unrealistic expectations.