Play, Imagination, Emotion, and Art in Literary Interpretation: Revisiting Old Work Through a New Lens

In this article, I revisit research published in 1995 during the early stages of my efforts to understand and apply Vygotskian concepts to my studies of school literacy. The research analyzed two teenaged girls in an alternative high school for recovering substance abusers as they interpreted William Carlos Williams’ short story “The Use of Force” through an interpretive dance. In this article, I revisit the study with a greater theoretical emphasis on the students’ emotional states and growth through choreographing their interpretation, evidence of which was in the original data but overlooked in theorizing. The article reviews the genesis of the original article, explores its theoretical shortcomings, introduces a new theoretical apparatus oriented to emotional life as central to developmental trajectories, and applies this theory to the data in ways that my developmental state 30 years ago was not capable of providing.