Teaching Literature with Artificial Intelligence explores the use of chatbots as participants in the teaching and learning of literature in high school and college classrooms while highlighting potentially outmoded norms and expectations of ELA instruction. Artificial intelligence programs have profoundly altered the daily realities of teachers and students, inspiring concern and opportunity alike. Thought-provoking, theoretically grounded, and full of replicable autoethnographic experiments, this book offers real-world examples of generative chatbot technologies in ELA classrooms, positioning their accessibility and ubiquity as an incentive for critiquing and enriching traditional teaching and learning approaches. Graduate students, teaching faculty, and scholars of teacher education, English and literature education, digital literacies, and learning design will come away with a sharp critique of the purported affordances of chatbots as well as an incisive demonstration of AI as a classroom tool that supports, rather than diminishes, the meaningful learning, critical thinking, and agentive development of young people today.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Demystifying the Machine 2. Authority and Interpretive Freedom in Reading 3. Interrogating Dominant Pedagogies of the ELA Classroom 4. The Limits of Literary Discourse with Generative AI 5. Experiments in the ChatBot Book Club 6. Reverse-Engineering Literature Instruction 7. AI as Thought Provider, Partner, and Provoker
About the Author :
Eric D. Abrams is Clinical Lecturer and Senior Director of Clinical Experiences for the Department of Education at Iona University, USA.
Review :
"It is readable, full of voice, and marked by a humility that recognizes how quickly the ground beneath us is moving. Teaching Literature with Artificial Intelligence offers something teachers are desperate for right now: permission to approach AI with the vulnerability of discovery, without pretending we can outpace the technology, or surrender the classroom to it."
—Book Review: Teaching Literature with Artificial Intelligence (2025). The English Record, 74(1), 2026.
"It is readable, full of voice, and marked by a humility that recognizes how quickly the ground beneath us is moving. Teaching Literature with Artificial Intelligence offers something teachers are desperate for right now: permission to approach AI with the vulnerability of discovery, without pretending we can outpace the technology, or surrender the classroom to it."
—Book Review: Teaching Literature with Artificial Intelligence (2025). The English Record, 74(1), 2026.
