Abstract: This dissertation begins by asking a fundamental, pressing question that especially troubled me during my years of social work with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps: 'Why study American literature, or any literature at all?' My first chapter examines the contradictory and politically loaded responses to this question. The debate about whether literature and literary study are in a crisis has split scholars into those who stress the importance of literature's ethical functions and those who stress its aesthetic qualities. I argue that aesthetics and ethics are not mutually exclusive tools, capable of serving only the left or the right. I propose a theory of reading that values literature for its ability to push our thinking toward new, experimental concepts, an ability that is best understood in the context of Kant's non-formalist account of the sublime, and its ability to reflect, reveal, and critique the social construction of reason, an ability that is best understood in the context of Gramscian thought. The aesthetic and the ethical inform both abilities. In subsequent chapters, I support this argument by demonstrating how hegemonic beliefs are undercut by my reading of three American novels from different historical periods: Don DeLillo's White Noise, Nella Larsen's Passing, and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . My last chapter uses Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying to re-examine the practice of justice in teaching these novels, and in teaching American literature at universities, high schools and middle schools.