What's one strategy you use as a literature professor to encourage students to engage with challenging texts?

To me, it's all about finding ways to bring the literature to life so that students can connect with it and understand the relevance it has to their own lives. In a group setting, this often means conducting brainstorming sessions where we deconstruct terms that we might take for granted or at face value, so we can unpack the layers of meaning. For instance, one of my favorite strategies to use for "Waiting for Godot" is to break the class into groups, each assigned one word of the title, where each composes a group deconstruction of that word on consecutive sections of the board. What we start to see is that each word by itself can take on numerous meanings, but in relation to each other, their meanings become interdependent and determine multiple paths. This, then, gets us into the larger question of what it all means, what it feels like to wait for something that might never come, to be dependent on that never-coming-entity. Which gets us talking about powerlessness and autonomy and interdependence, and the very human paradoxes Beckett throws us into and the contexts in which we experience those things. We were wrestling with this text when the world shut down in 2020, and all of a sudden a play that seemed impossible to understand made a visceral sense. In an independent context, each student in my classes keeps a reading journal that I never look at (I don't want them to feel me peering over their shoulder as they read), but that forms the basis of all of their projects. In one-on-one sessions throughout the semester, we use these journals--the questions they're raising as they read, the confusions they're having, the issues the material is challenging them to grapple with--as the starting point for conversations that get us deeply into the "meat" of these texts. We then look for patterns in the ideas they're raising and I help them to craft projects where they can pursue these ideas in a medium that naturally aligns with their own interests. In these projects, I encourage them to really use the questions they're raising about the literature to draw in a targeted audience who live in the midst of these questions. So, for instance, there was one wonderful project on Kafka's novel, "The Trial," from a student headed into a corporate job: a memo to imagined co-workers that served as a cautionary tale about finding a healthy work-life balance!