Literary reading as a socially responsive practice: Implications for literature pedagogy at higher education

Abstract As university teachers of literature, we tend to accept the rhetoric that students lack the capacity to interpret texts meaningfully, without questioning our own biases about the kinds of meaning we expect them to elicit from texts. Often, these are meanings that have little relevance to students' own social or professional lives. In this article, we report on a research project on literary reading at a South African university in which we set out to find out how our second‐year English literature student teachers were reading or making sense of Shakespearean plays and how in turn their readings inform new thinking about literary reading. We found that our students were interpreting Shakespeare's Macbeth in ways that both explicate social problems in present‐day South Africa and offer possible solutions to remedying these problems. Therefore, our knowledge contribution in this article is the proposition of socially responsive literary reading as a relevant, empowering and viable approach to literary reading that has potential to decolonise literature education in African universities.