A Special Gift 1 A Special Gift: Archetypes in Ancient Literature as a Reflection of Readers ’ Languaged Understandings

Arguably, all college instructors have an interest in a learner’s reading skills even if we do not teach arts and letters. Logically, this interest extends to those products of student reading that Egan (1997) called languaged understandings: individual recognitions served by oral and written language activities. Many of us may similarly concur that learning is enhanced by if not dependent upon the learner’s ability to connect something new to something known. Defabio (1993) claimed the ability to connect as critical to evaluating a learner’s competence in language. In most classrooms, these connections likely involve a reader’s linking parts of a text, text/s to texts, and sometimes texts to personal experience. However, as nature and nurture vary, to make these connections, students are situated and motivated variously. While it seems incumbent upon an instructor to find ways to assist, only the student decides whether to take advantage of it. If decision-making is to some degree shaped by both feeling and thinking, as Myers Briggs theory has long supposed, then meaningful interactions with texts is more likely to occur more often for more students when assignments prompt both kinds of considerations. A subject like literature naturally lends itself to affective considerations because its characters engage in behaviors and reveal attitudes which speak variously to readers ’ values. Although many of us were raised to see literature as providing vicarious experience, Rosenblatt (1938) was among the first to claim that reading literatur