ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the kinds of risks teachers and students take in the literature classroom, the risks that are involved with Dialogic Literary Argumentation, and how creating a classroom community that encourages risk taking helps students to foster more complex understandings of literary works and the worlds in which they live. What counts as high quality literature from the perspective of Dialogic Literary Argumentation is necessarily oriented to the opportunities the literary work provides a particular set of students to explore the question, “What does it mean to be human together at a particular time and place?” Rather than an absolute measure of quality based on, inclusion in the literary canon, what counts as high quality literature from the perspective of Dialogic Literary Argumentation is necessarily oriented to the opportunities the literary work provides a particular set of students to explore the question, “What does it mean to be human together at a particular time and place?”.
