78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST reject'98 In other words, how to read bourgeois and feudal literature in a socialist way? It raises a host of problems of reading, interpreting and evaluating bourgeois and pre-bourgeois literature. These problems are not discussed in a planned or systematic way in this book. It is not meant to be an exercise in radical literary scholarship. Most of the essays intersperse critical comments with autobiographical narratives, are rambling and discursive, but of absorbing interest. The book is basically an exploration of the possible ways in which radical politics can be made to permeate the teaching of literature. The contributors to the present volume are fully conscious of their political tasks as literary intellectuals. They are unanimous in their conviction, arrived at in the course of their bitter encounters with the academic and political authorities, that the problems teachers face are rooted in the fundamental political conflicts of society. The editors Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter had taken a leading part in the "Little Bourgeois Cultural Revolution" in the Modern Languages Association in 1968. All the contributors have been activists in the radical left poliiical movement in the U S. Many of them were fired from their academic posts for political reasons. Some have spent short terms in jail. Political Involvement In their introductory paper Kampf and Lauter point out that the academic establishment resists every attempt to radicalize literature teaching by preaching professional specialization, academic integrity, maintenance of standards and avoidance of politics. Arguing against this ostrich-hkc smugness they say: The voices preaching peace, peace, when there is no peace in America are, too often, the voices of academic tenure and privilege: those who have already substituted professional self-interest for the interests of students, who identify what's good for America as what's good for the Faculty Senate. For most of us, however, and for those whom privilege has not deadened to students and to literature, and to the needs of communities excluded from the campus, the problem isn't holding on to what we have, but finding how to participate in change. Both self- interest and commitments to social justice lead, we would argue, towards altering our roles as students or critics of literature.4 The contributors believe that teachers of literature should extend their activity beyond the classroom and help in the formation of socialist movement. Speaking for all of them Ellen Cantarow says in her paper ^Why Teach Literature?": Our responsibility as teachers of literature, then, in rebuilding scholarship, a new intelligentsia, an active socialist movement, is no different from the responsibility of our comrades in history, in economics, in biology. Our particular responsibility as teachers of literature is to act on the humanizing knowledge art can give us (o