Nicola Mitterer, Hajnalka Nagy, Werner Wintersteiner (eds.): The Demands of Literature as a Challenge for Literature Teaching. Theoretical Perspectives on Literature Didactics. Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2016.
The term 'demands of literature' is programmatic: It stands for literature instruction and literature didactics that clearly distance themselves from the dominant discourse of competency orientation and the functionalization of school learning. The contributions to this volume place the adventure of textual encounters back at the center of a literature lesson whose outcome cannot be determined in advance. This literary-aesthetic approach is based on a precise reading of the text, which attends to each individual word, its structure, and its linguistic distortions, but which also attentively registers one's own reactions to the text and ultimately relates these reactions to the language of the text itself. The result is literature instruction that does justice to both the learners and the literary works.