According to Johnson and Freedman (2006, p. 16), "when teachers decide to embrace a critical pedagogy, they are deciding to bring a questioning stance into their classroom". Critical pedagogy advances the belief that all students should be taught the skills and strategies needed to acquire a critical/questioning attitude towards the texts and the world. By addressing issues of social power and oppression or issues of class, race and gender, critical pedagogy promotes student practices that help them become active and engaged readers as they search for meaning and question the ideologies inherent in the texts they read. Students are asked to stand outside the textually or professionally inscribed reading position and offer new interpretive perspectives. Throughout the present paper we highlight the idea that when we teach literature our primary concern should be to help students learn how to experience literary texts actively, not to provide them with an authoritarian type of reading or mere information about what a text means. Therefore, the principal aim of this paper is to offer a theoretical framework and some practical applications in teaching literature that will allow students to move beyond solipsistic reading and will strengthen their interpretive capacities in the act of reading. (Contains 18 footnotes.)