The article addresses the question of how English departments best can teach literature and literary reading to future upper-secondary school teachers of English. It approaches the question in terms of the literary scholar’s contribution to the professional education and practice of school teachers in Sweden. The article combines metacognitive analyses of disciplinary ways of thinking with profession theory to reflect on the literary content knowledge upper secondary school teachers need for their teaching practice. It outlines key differences between the understanding of what reading literature entails in academia and in upper secondary education, respectively, and it points out that current academic practices for teaching literature rely on a narrow understanding of what school teachers need to know about literature and literary reading to exercise their professional judgement concerning literature in the language classroom. Advocating a change in our academic teaching practices, the article proposes that literary debates over reading also be incorporated and that the principles and procedures underpinning professional modes of reading literature be explicitly articulated. This means verbalizing underlying theoretical assumptions about the value of literature and of reading it and explicating interpretative conventions and tools, alongside the skills, involved in literary reading. Such a teaching practice, the article posits, is not merely key to developing school teachers’ content knowledge regarding literature and reading. It is also a prerequisite for the development of their pedagogical reasoning when it comes to the uses of literature and to the affordances and limitations of literary reading in the school classroom.