Carolyn Allen Recently, while investigating the role of the reader in literary interpretation, I found myself running across footnotes and parenthetical references to the work of Louise Rosenblatt. There was Wayne Booth referring to her "unfortunately neglected works"; Steven Mailloux mentioning her in a footnote to a chapter that summarized the work of Iser, Bleich, Fish, and Culler; and David Bleich acknowledging her early work but criticizing it for being allegedly moral and pragmatic rather than theoretical (Booth 442; Mailloux 37n; Bleich 110). Suspecting a phallic plot to overlook the work of a woman scholar, I read through the two anthologies of what has come to be called "reader-response criticism," hoping for enlightenment from their female editors. Neither included articles by Louise Rosenblatt, though both mentioned her in their summary introductions, one by noting her "pioneering work in the field of subjective criticism," but saying it came to her attention too late to be included (Suleiman 45). Finally, I turned directly to Rosenblatt' s work to reach my own conclusions about her contributions to reader-response theory. I retrieved her 1938 book, Literature as Exploration, from the farthest reaches of our library stacks, the shelves where books have been kept so long that they still have Dewey Decimal call numbers. My first response to Literature as Exploration was, "This is wonderful." In 1938 she had already written a philosophy of literary teaching that had taken me ten years of practice to work out. She stressed the relationship between literature and the students' social, psychological, and cultural worlds and the need for the teacher to have an interdisciplinary knowledge of the social sciences. She also delineated what happens in the act of reading, declaring that the novel or poem exists in interaction with specific minds, and that reading any literary work is a unique experience involving the mind and emotions of some particular reader. Those ideas, reflected throughout the book, led to her later, more fully developed theoretical considerations of the contributions of the reader to the literary work. From that beginning she went on to develop what she calls the transactional theory of reading. In it she conceives the poem (or any literary work) not as an object, but as an experience shaped by the reader under the guidance of the text, which she defines as "printed signs in their capacity to serve as symbols" (The Reader, the Text, the Poem 24). The poem is an event in time that comes about through a transaction between the reader and the text. Her theory shares with Iser's a conception of the text as a set of "clues" (Iser calls them reading instructions) to guide the reader's performance. But unlike Iser's theory, the details of her work are not particularly well known among literary theorists. I'd like to suggest why that might be by sketching the critical reception of her two bestknown books: her pedagogical study, Literature as Exploration, and her theoretical work, The Reader, the Text, the Poem. From the beginning of her distinguished career, Louise Rosenblatt has had two reputations, one as a literary historian and critic, the other as a shaper of pedagogical philosophy. Her first book, L'Idee de I'art pour l'art dans la litterature anglaise, on theories of art for art's sake in nineteenth-century French and English writers, was her comparative literature dissertation at the Sorbonne. Published in French in 1931, it has remained a classic in the field for more than fifty years. In its final pages she noted the "need for a public of readers able to participate fully in the poetic experience'" (The Reader xi). From that closing observation came the interest in the reader's role that, together with her pedagogical philosophy, is central to Literature as Exploration. These two books, one scholarly, the other largely pedagogical, treat topics that culminate in the theoretical work of The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Ironically, the very success of these earlier works has prevented her later theoretical ideas from receiving the attention they deserve. Only after I reread Literature as Exploration and learned more about its publishing history did I see that the appearance of Rosenblatt's work in footnotes rather than in chapters of recent theoretical studies of reader response was at least in part a result of the continuing unfortunate split in our profession between pedagogy on the one hand and literary criticism and theory on the other. In fact, that split has not always been so acute. When Literature as Exploration was first published, it was widely praised not only by teachers and teachers of teachers, but also by leading literary critics as well. Howard Mumford Jones was so impressed when he read the book in manuscript that he invited Rosenblatt, then a young literature instructor at Barnard, to join with him and other established scholars to draw up a statement on the teaching of literature for PMLA. It was published in 1938, the same year as her book. Since that time Literature as Exploration has never been out of print. It has gone through three editions, has long been available through the National Council of Teachers of English, and since 1976 has been distributed by the MLA, which just this year reprinted it as an official MLA publication. Thus it is only those of us working recently in literary criticism and theory who feel we have made a significant discovery on the back shelves of the library. Earlier scholars and those who worked in pedagogical method have known all along where to find it. Recent critics who acknowledge that Rosenblatt was "the first among the present generation of critics in this country to describe empirically the way the reader's reactions to a poem are responsible for any subsequent interpretation of it" (Tompkins xxvi) generally attribute the lack of attention given her theoretical ideas to the all-pervasive influence of New Criticism in the years following the publication of Literature as Exploration. Clearly any book that claimed that "the novel or poem or play exists ... only in interactions with specific minds," (Literature 32) was not championing "the poem itself" or celebrating impersonality or avoiding the affective fallacy. Certainly, the hegemony of the New Criticism in the years following World War 11 turned critical attention away from the emphasis on the reader's experience, and it is to Rosenblatt's credit that she continued to pursue and refine her ideas when it was so unfashionable to do so. But that is, I think, not the only reason why her contributions to reader-response theory have not been accorded the attention given her literary scholarship and her ideas about teaching literature. Rosenblatt developed her transactional theory in articles in College English, Educational Record, and the Journal of Reading Behavior, and so her work may not have been well known to literary theorists doing similar study. Or, more likely, articles published in these journals may have been deemed of interest only to the practitioner and not to the theorist, even though College English, an official journal of the NCTE, has often contributed substantially to literary critical debates. Similar divisions between applied and theoretical scholars exist in a number of disciplines including linguistics, anthropology, and sociology. Yet other critics who share her interest in pedagogy have gained their measure of theoretical fame. Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, and David Bleich all cite their teaching and describe the responses of their students. In Bleich's work, in fact, the literary text nearly gives way to student responses as the focus of the interpretive act. So if it isn't her empiricism per se that has kept her from being better known as a theorist, what is it? First, she is a woman. seen as addressing a stereotypic woman's profession about the importance of emotional response. Her interest in English education, her pedagogical emphasis in Literature as Exploration, and the very acclaim this work has received from secondary classroom teachers and from leading members of the NCTE each have militated against a more serious understanding of her theoretical work-in short, politics, both sexual and academic. Second, there is the question of her theoretical sources. Though her wide-ranging knowledge of continental philosophy is evident throughout The Reader, the Text, the Poem, it is primarily to American rather than European theorists that she looks-to Charles Peirce, George Santayana, William James, and John Dewey. It is they rather than Husserl or Ingarden who speak most obviously through her work. She follows her own philosophical path, and it leads her to an American rather than a continental allegiance, equally weighty, but less theoretically fashionable. Finally, she refuses to use the discourse that we have come to associate with recent critical theory. In the preface to The Reader, the Text, the Poem, her culminating theoretical book, she says that she has "avoided the current tendency to create new terminology" and held citations to a minimum (xi). All these facts have kept her theoretical work from being as well known in contemporary MLA circles as her pedagogical writing is among members of the NCTE. That she has not had a voice in the recent Fish-Iser or Bleich-Holland debates is again a consequence of politics. Fortunately, she has spent forty years pursuing her own line of inquiry undaunted by the stream of critical fashion running in other directions. It is heartening to see that she is now, however belatedly, recognized as "a pioneer" and "the first among the present generation." Better late than never. Critical reception of The Reader, the Text, the Poem demonstrates some of these considerations. Reviewers for the English Journal, the CEA Critic, and College English all praised it without reservation (Douglas; Miller). Alan Hollingsworth's College English review is typical. It begins, "The Reader, the Text, the Poem is a major contribution to literary and critical theory. It should be read, re-read, and reflected on by anyone involved with the activity of reading" (223). Reviews for the Sewanee Review and the Yale Review, though they praised many of the book's ideas, were more critical. Monroe Beardsley who, as a principle proponent of the affective fallacy could hardly be expected to agree with her emphases, nevertheless says it "deserves much praise for its contribution to our understanding of reading as response" and finds her illuminations "especially helpful to the teacher of literature." But he criticizes her lack of separation between "elements of the [literary] experience ... under [the] control [of the text], and ... [the reader's] feelings and personal associations that may be present and allowable but do not belong to the work" (642). Terence Hawkes also criticizes her treatment of the concept, "text." Yet Rosenblatt's ideas about the degree of determinacy in the text are no more problematic than they are in say, Iser, whose The Act of Reading was published in English the same year as The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Like Rosenblatt, Iser is not clear where the determinacy of the text supplied by the author ends and where the production of meaning by the reader begins. Yet Iser has been acclaimed as an important theorist in a way that Rosenblatt has not. The imbalance in some of these critical assessments may stem in part from the conscious stylistic differences between the two critics. In describing how the reading process works, Iser writes, |
The reader's part in the gestalt consists in identifying the connection between the signs; the... 'autocorrelation' will prevent him [sic] from projecting an arbitrary meaning on the text, but at the same time the gestalt can only be formed as an identified equivalence through the hermeneutic schema of anticipation and fulfillment in relation to the connections perceived between the signs (120). |
Of a similar moment Rosenblatt says, |
What the reader has elicited from the text up to any point generates a receptivity to certain kinds of ideas, overtones, or attitudes. Perhaps one can think of this as an altering of certain areas of memory, a stirring up of certain reservoirs of experience, knowledge, and feeling. As the reading proceeds, attention will be fixed on the reverberations or implications that result from fulfillment or frustration of those expectations (The Reader 54). |
I make this comparison of discourse not to disparage Iser, from whom I have learned a great deal, but to suggest that perhaps Rosenblatt has not been taken as seriously simply because she made a conscious decision to eschew jargon and use a straightforward style. In their incomplete attention to Rosenblatt's literary theory, commentators have failed to see how her departure from her colleagues empowers her work. Part of the strength of her professional contribution comes from her testing of theory by practice. Her work differs most markedly from other reader-response work in its understanding of the reader. She is not caught up in the construction of characterized, ideal, informed, implied, or intended readers because her interest is in what happens when particular people read a particular text at a particular moment in time. Having declared for real readers, however, she is not much concerned with analyzing their psyches, but in the reader's becoming self-aware, self-critical, and self-enhancing. She emphasizes their transaction with the text and argues that they "crystallize out from the stuff of memory, thought, and feeling a new experience which [they] see as a poem." Thus she conceives of "the concept of the poem as the experience shaped by the reader under the guidance of the text" (The Reader 12). It is this last idea of the poem as a reader's experience of it that she has, over the years, championed most strongly against the competing definitions posed by the New Critics. Ironically, she now finds herself defending, as they might have, the propriety of close reading against the versions of reader criticism that draw on ego-psychology or psychoanalytic theory to analyze individual responses. While Rosenblatt stresses the importance of the reader's emotional response, she rejects pure subjectivity in interpretation. Her current theoretical work contributes in a new way to the old debate about the nature of literature. She accounts for poeticity by formulating a continuum to describe the stances that the reader might take or be encouraged to take during the reading process. At one pole is the aesthetic, the full absorption in the rich experience of thought and feeling during the reading itself. At the other is the efferent. In efferent readings, the reader reads through the text, seeking only to take away specific bits of information at its conclusion, as one would do when reading instructions on a bottle or a recipe. Thus she focuses on the shifting stance of the reader rather than on the language of the text as the source of "literariness." Consideration of this idea allows us to think more carefully about why we read and how our differing reading stances help create different literary experiences as we select various strands of the text for attention. No other reader-response critic considers such stances as part of a theory of reading. Indications are that her work is quietly making its way. The Reader, the Text, the Poem is being read in graduate courses in criticism, rhetoric, and literary theory, and the book appears on Lawrence Lipking's highly selective bibliography of literary criticism in the MLA's Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. Another such sign was the session on her transactional theory at a recent convention of the International Comparative Literature Association. Louise Rosenblatt has waited through forty-five years of shifting critical winds to see attention finally focus where she knew all along it ought to be: on the relationship between the reader and the text. She has given us a theoretical ground for our pedagogical practice, and she deserves as much credit as we can bestow, not only for being a pioneer, but for moving throughout her scholarly life from theory to practice and back. By steadfastly refusing to countenance the split between theory and application, she continues to exert a healing influence on our profession. With her long-standing reputations in both literary and pedagogical study, and with her growing reputation as a theorist, she truly is one of our most versatile and eminent scholars. University of Washington |
Daftar Pustaka :
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