Throughout the history of English Language Arts education, educators have relied on literature as a tool for the cultivation of knowledge: cultural knowledge, moral and critical knowledge, and knowledge of skills and strategies. The English Language Arts curriculum’s increasingly technocratic agenda (Brandt, 2015; Brass, 2014) has resulted not only in the marginalization of literature, but also in the increased instrumentalization of literature—the increased “tooling” of literature toward rational ends. Rather than focusing on literature’s “ends,” and asking what kinds of knowledge literature might help to facilitate, this project focuses on and takes as its starting point the relationships that comprise the literature curriculum, namely the relationships between readers and texts. By applying a Rancièrian lens of equality to literature’s more traditional curricular frameworks, I make visible how and when these frameworks perpetuate inequality between readers and texts. Then, using Rancièrian equality, along with my own and others’ lived experience of reading literature, I imagine a kind of event not accounted for in literature’s more rational-instrumental frames: literary communion. I conceive of literary communion as more sacramental than rational-instrumental, evoking a sense of spiritual transcendence, transubstantiation, and giftedness. In my quest to unpack these sacramental dimensions of literary communion, I elaborate their implications for longstanding pedagogical and curricular traditions of close reading, reader response, and emancipation. I conclude by acknowledging that openness to literary communion in the English Language Arts curriculum is, in many ways, a departure from certainty and control. In keeping with the sacramental connotations of communion as well as the spirit of “as if” undergirding Rancièrian equality, literary communion might reframe the teaching of literature as a matter of faith.
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