Adapting strategies of invention from the new process-oriented rhetoric, the literature teacher can help students understand what they read through prereading exercises. Presenting students with an abstract model of a text's metaphoric structure, the teacher can spark students' immediate and imaginative response to the model, involving them directly in the author's creative process before asking them to make abstract generalizations about the work. Before reading Yeats's "The Second Coming," for example, the teacher can first elicit student associations through use of a diagram of a gyre, and then lead students to see how tornadoes, vortices, broken watch springs, or other possible responses reveal a tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces, a tension central to the understanding of Yeats's poem. More effective than having students respond to visual models, however, is having them create their own diagrams. By directing class discussion and writing on these visual metaphors, the teacher helps students focus attention on the particulars of the text, on their own personal responses, and--in sharing their views with classmates--on the commonalities of literary response. (MM)