Teaching Arabic Literature remains one of the most challenging, yet important components of a comprehensive Arabic program. Often the volume and lexical difficulty of texts, as well as their cultural contexts, intimidate students at the intermediate and lower advanced levels. Students also may see the focus too heavily on reading at the expense of the other three language skills. This study will present and discuss an innovative method for teaching Arabic literature that is adaptable to different proficiency levels. Using instructor-selected excerpts, with targeted cultural and linguistic preparation, students “engage” the central themes of the texts by assuming key roles. Through either written or verbal interaction, students negotiate critical points of literary texts in a logical sequence, reconstructing the main narrative directions. These techniques include dialogue construction, debate, role playing and reflective writing. While not a substitute for complete, close reading of long works, it serves as a bridge for students not yet at a sufficient proficiency level for reading novel-length texts. The guiding concept is to encourage students to engage the texts on a personal level. This study will use example lessons based on two Modern Arabic novels, Najib Mahfuz’s Before the Throne and Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, created for upper intermediate and lower advanced students, respectively. These examples will illustrate how an integrated series of lessons can be produced to reflect the central narrative of a single text. The study will also discuss structural and cultural characteristics of the Arabic language and Arabic literary genres that can be explored though student engagement. Student activities to explore modern treatment of the Arab concept of the traditional hakawati as it influenced both Mahfuz’s and Kanafani’s novels will be used as an example to illustrate how this technique may be applied in a practical way.