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The folklorist Vladímir Propp identified a curious phenomenon in his study of 100 Russian fairy tales: despite their tremendous surface variety, they followed a single narrative structure or morphology. This article argues that the same phenomenon applies to SoTL articles: despite the tremendous variety of content and methods that SoTL articles evince, they have come to tell the same kind of story. They tell, over and over, a story of redemption. I identify two problems with the story of redemption, the first having to do with ethos (the character that an author projects to their readers), and the second having to do with plausibility. I propose an array of narrative possibilities to enable SoTL authors to tell other kinds of stories--possibilities based on problematizing rather than easily solving. I argue that these possibilities better realize how some of the foundational thinkers in SoTL wanted the field to evolve. While benefiting all SoTL practitioners, such an expansion of narrative possibilities will make the field a more welcoming place to humanities scholars in particular, many of whom share a skepticism about the possibility of linear progress and perpetual self-improvement.

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work's characters. For us, such attachments constitute "reading badly." But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work's author. A consideration of critical responses to "Benito Cereno" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" enables us to see how our own identifications often operate. In our teaching of reading, we should openly acknowledge our own commitments and help our students negotiate them. (Contains 32 notes.)

An introduction to an essay on a teacher's experience of teaching an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem in a class in Salalah, Oman, published within the issue is presented.

Joseph Harris has experienced the "multidisciplinarity" of Duke's freestanding writing program as liberating. My article explores how this freedom from disciplinarity is experienced not by a WPA but by an instructor in such a program. This is an autobiographical account that describes how my work at Harvard's Expository Writing Program ("Expos") shaped me. In the course of this account, I describe Expos' evolution into a program that would base its pedagogy on what academic writing shares across the disciplines. The designers of the revamped Expos were thinking about the effect the new program would have on students, but it would also have a profound effect on its instructors--or at least it did in my case. Initially, L too, found my work at Expos both empowering and liberating, but the reasons for that reaction also caused problems for me in my post-Expos academic career. This article uncovers a problem in freestanding writing program like Duke's, not in terms of how I was exploited as a contingent laborer (which I do not believe I was) but in the way that such a program shaped me intellectually, making it die, cult for me to adjust to a post-Expos life of disciplinarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors describe the kinds of articles they want to publish, including literary critiques that deal with postcolonialism, globalization, and diaspora.