Teaching Ambiguity

Conveying these ideas to his students hasn't always been so easy, however.

Chaouli recalls that when he first started teaching at Harvard he would begin a class by presenting one interpretation of a work of literature and then follow it with another. His students would often cross out their notes on the first interpretation, thinking it was proved wrong by the second.

"They didn't understand," Chaouli remembers, "that the second interpretation lives off the first. Literature doesn't drive to one point that you can write down and say on an exam."

There is still, of course, certain information that must be known to study literature. "You need to know what happens on a structural level to understand the excesses to that structure that authors use," Chaouli says.

Still, what is truly learned from the study of literature is not something that can be written on a syllabus. It is a side-effect, a moment when something clicks.

Chaouli's critics have not taken kindly to his ideas. A recent letter to

the Times Literary Supplement attacked him for allowing theories that have been discarded by other disciplines, such as Freudian analysis, to be considered legitimate in the study of literature. By that reasoning, the letter claimed, the flat earth theory could also be useful to literary scholars.