Designed for introductory literature courses, Literary Conversation presents critical thinking, reading, and writing strategies designed to elicit successful interpretation of literary works. The text invites students to join widening and concentric circles of conversation, beginning with the interaction of the reader with the voices in the literary work, and expanding to include the contributions of other readers, the dialogues of the disciplinary community, and finally the voices of other experienced readers in published criticism. Within each circle of conversation, students can explore their observations through reading notebooks, through collaborative reading groups, and through essays which ask them to look at a work from a series of progressively complicated positions: students write responses to, analyses of, critical arguments about, and research essays on literary works. Unlike texts organized by genre, literary technique, or theme, Literary Conversation is both a rhetoric of reading and a rhetoric of writing about reading.