By using a thematic approach and by drawing on other disciplines for breadth, English teachers can "honorably seduce" career-oriented students into a love affair with literature and draw them back into the English curriculum. For example, a teacher's conversation with a student focusing on fathers and sons led the teacher to suggest that the student read Kafka's "Letter to My Father," after which the student read Hess's "Siddhartha," Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons," Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz," and other works concerning the father/son relationship. Another teacher introduced a student who was interested in psychiatric nursing to works by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and to other works containing suicidal characters. An entire course that used as its theme the dilemma of the artist in society involved extensive discussions, a variety of readings, and a number of short papers for each of the readings. The course concluded with an opportunity for students to respond to a particular work through dance, art, poetry, or reading aloud. Meanings in literature are not embedded in the work independent of individual interpretation. The importance of reader response, then, supports the notion of structuring literature around thematic units. (HTH)