T.V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political actionand between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements"; and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism? In strikingly new interpretations of texts in four different genresAgee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ellison's Invisible Man, Mailer's Armies of the Night, and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980sReed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality.