I agree with Dave, except for his use of "must be seen as." There are certainly other valid ways to view literature. Dave's way is one valid and useful way of seeing it. Sometimes, it is more useful to view it as a symptom of those ailments rather than a treatment. Otherwise, what are we to do with things like Pound's, Eliot's, Hemingway's, Cather's, and Fitzgerald's racism and anti-Semitism? By the way, the whole idea of "reading literature as literature" seems to me to be fairly simple and straightforward. The New Critics paved the way for this kind of reading. They went to extremes, but their offspring, the formalists, are pretty clear about what that term means. Richard Tuerk, Literature & Languages, East Texas State U