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Hi Will This discussion is very interesting to me. Speaking as someone who neither reads literature nor writes lit crit when she can avoid it, I nonetheless find the skills I acquired from writing lit crit essays as an undergraduate are fundamental to most of my current work, in a variety of ways--as writer, teacher, editor. Cathy touched on some of the skills that can be acquired from writing student lit crit, but the ones I'm thinking of must be viewed as too common-place and basic to ever grace the pages of any theory-based approach I've read--be it post structural, feminist, grammatical, semantic, rhetorical, or whatever. These skills have not got much to do with either personal growth or socialization (i.e. publication or teaching), but directly with the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake. Specifically what I learned from this apprenticeship is how to represent reasoning processes in written language. Some examples: What I learned in school: 1) When you introduce a quoted passage, you need to explain why it is significant to your argument. The quote doesn't speak for itself and it requires your intellectual labour to show why it connects to your analysis/interpretation. 2) When you want to compare two passages or concepts, you not only need to explain why the second example is similar to the first, but you also have to account for any residual ideas which are not parallel to the first passage, and say why either they are not significant, or why they are. 3) When you analyse passages, stories, texts, you are looking to make generalizations about patterns and relationships. and conversely, when you make a generalization about a pattern, you are required to support it with evidence from the passage, story, text. I learned these skills by trial and error, and because I wanted to know them. Perhaps if this information was put to those students who don't "get it," who don't care if they get it, but who are required to take literature courses and who rank "writing lit crit essays" in the same category of desirability as "becoming a professional dishwasher," they might start to understand its relevance to their interests. They could use these skills in this third-year business communication course I'm teaching, What I have to tell my students: 1) When you introduce a method or finding, you need to explain why it's significant to your research report. The method or finding doesn't speak for itself and it requires your intellectual labour to show why it connects to your analysis/interpretation. 2) When you want to compare two findings or categories or criteria, you not only need to explain why the second example is similar to the first, but you also have to account for any residual ideas which are not parallel to the first finding, category, criteria, and say why either they are not significant, or why they are. 3) When you analyse data you are looking to make generalizations about patterns and relationships. and conversely, when you make a generalization about a pattern, you are required to support it with evidence from your data. These are only a few examples, I can think of lots more. The skills required to accomplish these tasks can be transferred directly from lit. crit. courses. It would make it easier for me to demonstrate this connection if I knew students already had the basic conceptual vocabulary in place, which could potentially be provided by a textbook such as you propose--you could show how writers in the lit crit genre use these features of topic structure to demonstrate reasoning processes which are used in other academic genres as well. Using Kieran Egan's model, outlined in The Educated Mind (which is a nifty little tool, actually) you can tell a story about this process: In order to develop the complex reasoning skills required of them, students need to recapitulate the stages of symbolic learning--they need to construct simple narratives (mythic understanding, and not something most adults are comfortable doing), then they need to read and write about the singular and the particular (romantic understanding--acquired from reading stories, among other things), and eventually to make generalizations and draw inferences about these singularities (philosophic--which is probably the desired outcome of such study). I can't think of a discipline or a genre in a better position to do the work of leading students through this process than English and the lit crit essay. But this approach is about features of the text,, not about personal growth or career development. Perhaps it is a more instrumentalist approach than you had planned to make. Cheers Sandra