Examining the relationship between language and literacy and the societal experiences that help shape it, this political and polemical book builds on the author's previous work in reader-response criticism and challenges the now dominant assumption that language is an individual transactionindependent of any social context. Moving through a series of interrelated essays, David Bleich explores topics including the social psychology of men, which he maintains exerts undue influence on everyone's education; conceptions of knowledge now offered by feminist epistemologists; socialconceptions of language and knowledge found in the work of G.H. Mead, L.S. Vygotsky, Ludwik Fleck, and Mikhail Bakhtin; the influence of gender on language use; the views of current thinkers on the social character of the classroom and academic communities; and the process of individual languagedevelopment.