| Foreword | p. v |
| Preface | p. ix |
| Introduction: Falling into Theory | p. 1 |
| Why We Read: The University, the Humanities, and the Province of Literature | p. 15 |
| What We Have Loved, Others Will Love | p. 31 |
| Disliking Books at an Early Age | p. 41 |
| The Rise of English | p. 49 |
| Introduction to Masks of Conquest | p. 60 |
| The "Banking" Concept of Education | p. 68 |
| Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy | p. 79 |
| The New Advocacy and the Old | p. 85 |
| The Function of English at the Present Time | p. 89 |
| Teaching Culture | p. 96 |
| The Demise of Disciplinary Authority | p. 103 |
| A Fortunate Fall? | p. 111 |
| What We Read: The Literary Canon and the Curriculum after the Culture Wars | p. 121 |
| Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne's Literary Reputation | p. 137 |
| Contingencies of Value | p. 147 |
| Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon | p. 153 |
| What Is a Minor Literature? | p. 167 |
| Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to the Told | p. 175 |
| From Epistemology of the Closet | p. 183 |
| The Politics of Knowledge | p. 189 |
| Introduction to A Feeling for Books | p. 199 |
| Telling Our Story about Teaching Literature | p. 211 |
| The Canon as Cultural Capital | p. 218 |
| Elegiac Conclusion | p. 225 |
| How We Read: Interpretive Communities and Literary Meaning | p. 235 |
| The Death of the Author | p. 253 |
| Actual Reader and Authorial Reader | p. 258 |
| How to Recognize a Poem When You See One | p. 268 |
| Do We Write the Text We Read? | p. 278 |
| The Female Swerve | p. 290 |
| From Sexual/Textual Politics | p. 295 |
| Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism | p. 302 |
| Black Matter(s) | p. 310 |
| An Image of Africa | p. 323 |
| The Frontier on Which Heart of Darkness Stands | p. 334 |
| Imperialism and Sexual Difference | p. 340 |
| Who Is Responsible in Ethical Criticism, and for What? | p. 349 |
| The Literary Imagination | p. 356 |
| Wanted Dead or Alive: Browning's Historicism | p. 366 |
| Reclaiming the Aesthetic | p. 378 |
| Aesthetics and the Literal Imagination | p. 391 |
| Appendix | p. 399 |
| Index | p. 405 |
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