In this article, the author focuses on the possibilities--and the limits--of undergraduate courses on the literature of poverty. He describes an undergraduate course he has taught on U.S. literature about poverty, but he also expresses doubt that such courses can help produce major social change. He argues that something about the literature of poverty poses a real, perhaps undecidable crisis for the practice of teaching. Like others who write about pedagogy and social justice, then, he wants to acknowledge a social reality, in this case poverty, and proposes a way to teach about that reality. (Contains 12 notes.)