Ullén, Magnus. 2016. “Reading literature rhetorically in education: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Prison-Door’ as an exercise in close reading” Nordic Journal of English Studies 15(2):142–158. Reading literature rhetorically in education: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Prison-Door’ as an exercise in close reading Magnus Ullén, Karlstad University Abstract Despite the many historical links between literature and rhetoric, teachers of literature have made relatively few attempts to draw on rhetoric for teaching purposes. The present article suggests how this may be done, and argues for the pedagogical benefits of taking a rhetorical approach to literature. By means of a close reading of the first chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I demonstrate how a text may be systematically explored through the five steps (partes) of the classical rhetorical process. In conclusion, it suggests that rhetoric may be a means to bridge the gap between the many facets of English as a second language subject, as rhetoric provides a holistic framework allowing us to study literature and culture as language, and vice versa. Keywords: rhetoric, literature, English education; Hawthorne 1. Introduction Rhetoric and literature have been deeply associated throughout Western history. It is commonly held that it is only toward the end of the eighteenth century that this long-standing association begins to break down (Gossman 1990: 228). While the link between the two disciplines has never been completely disowned, rhetoric and literature have come to be seen as contrasting rather than complimentary practices, and as a rule organized as distinct departments in the academy. 1 The consequence of this division is the curious separation of what might reasonably be seen as one subject into two separate ones: Literary departments typically 1 From a “neo-sophistic” (Walker 2000: xi) perspective, Jeffrey Walker calls on us to “rethink some key assumptions on which our histories of rhetoric have traditionally been based” (3), such as “that poetic, epideictic, or ‘literaturized’ forms of rhetoric are ‘secondary,’ derivative manifestations” (4) of a primary civic rhetoric. For examples of this view, see Baldwin 1924 and 1928. As Walker documents, this predominant view has been heavily critiqued by rhetoricians at least since the 1990s and also questioned by literary theorists and historians.