(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Rosenblatt was an American professor of English Literature.
She identified a crucial distinction between a text (the static words on the page) and a poem (the lived experience created when a reader and text interact). This poem is unique to each reading, “an event in time” (Rosenblatt 1994, 12):
It is not an object or an ideal entity. It happens during a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The reader brings to the text his past experience and present personality. Under the magnetism of the ordered symbols of the text, he marshals his resources and crystallizes out from the stuff of memory, thought, and feeling a new order, a new experience, which he sees as the poem.
Reading, therefore, is a transaction between reader and text. The text is a “blueprint for a literary work of art”, offering us “both openness and control” (p. 168). The reader is active, like a director, supplying the tempo, the gestures, and the actions of the cast of characters (p. 13).
Rosenblatt vehemently opposed the notion of the passive reader because the reader’s personal reservoir of life and language is the very material from which meaning is built. The “reader’s creation of a poem out of a text must be an active, self-ordering and self-corrective process” (p. 11). The text stimulates the reader, focusing their attention, and evoking their past experiences. The reader uses the text as a guide for which experiences to call forth: a regulator for their hypotheses about how the work unfolds (ibid.). Our emotions, memories, biases, and knowledge form our unique perspective, and this isn’t a problem to be overcome; it’s the lens through which the text comes to life for us.
This transactional theory of reading contrasts sharply with traditional views that see meaning as either residing solely within the text or being imposed on it by the reader. Words are just “squiggles on a page” until a reader’s mind “links the sign with what it points to” through a mental association, therefore a text has no single meaning (Karolides and Rosenblatt 1999). We shouldn’t treat the text “like a machine, whose parts can be analyzed without reference either to the maker or to the observer (or reader)” (Rosenblatt 1976, 280–1). Our readings are unique and personal. However, Rosenblatt is not suggesting “that every evocation from a text is as good as every other”: there’s no single, correct reading but there are “inadequate interpretations” (p. 281).
The distinction is difficult to settle in theory, but “we can arrive at some consensus about interpretations that are to be rejected as ignoring large elements in the work, or as introducing irrelevant or exaggerated responses” (ibid.). We can use the text as our “control” by asking what it contains that justifies our response (p. 282). We “can make clear the criteria, the framework of ideas or knowledge, or the standards of evaluation, that we are bringing to bear on our experience” (ibid.).
In the context of children’s English classes, Rosenblatt suggests that “Discussion of personal responses, of the text-as-lived-through, can thus give rise to a truly inductive study of literature” (p. 286). As adults, we can have a similar experience in book clubs and seminars. This act of sharing our responses to texts, discovering how other people respond to the same text, and scrutinising our reasons together, can further clarify standards by which meaning is made. We may discover that we have overeacted to, or ignored, some element, or “that some word or image has triggered a fantasy or awakened some personal preoccupation quite alien to the text” (ibid.). Having left school, we can create our own classrooms.
As students of literature we should seek works in which we can “become personally involved”—the “quality of the actual reading experiences” trumping the complexity or greatness of the work being read (p. 283). Rosenblatt encourages us to bring to the text whatever in our past experience is relevant; not read coldly, “arriving first at something called “the meaning” or the paraphrasable sense, and then starting to feel or think about it” (p. 284). We should ensure that in our approach “we are not in actuality substituting other aims—things to do about literature—for the experience of literature” (p. 287).
These approaches to a text are governed by our stance: the purpose that shapes what is paid attention to during the reading event. In an efferent stance our attention is focused on what will be retained after the reading—information, facts, directions, data: “what will remain as the reside” (Rosenblatt 1994, 23). In an aesthetic stance our attention is focused instead on what we experience during the reading—the feelings, ideas, sensations, and emotions evoked: what the reader “is living through” in their relationship with that particular text (p. 25). These stances are extremes on a continuum of approaches to reading, and we generally adopt one automatically, according to our purpose for reading and the cues offered by the text (pp. 23, 54). Instead, Rosenblatt suggests, we should make this choice consciously by matching our stance to our purpose, then fluidly shifting along the continuum during reading. By directing our attention appropriately—reading some texts, some passages, more efferently, and others more aesthetically—we shape the poem we produce.
The literary work, then, is a new experience we mould from the text: “a text, once it leaves its author’s hands, is simply paper and ink until a reader evokes from it a literary work—sometimes, even, a literary work of art” (p. ix). Imaginative literature is “an extension, an amplification, of life itself” (Rosenblatt 1976, 278). Our purpose is to combine this reading experience with our other experiences, which is why the “benefits of literature can emerge only from creative activity” on our part (ibid.). We become better readers when we accept and embrace the process by which we read (ibid.):
As the reader submits himself to the guidance of the text, he must engage in a most demanding kind of activity. Out of his past experience, he must select appropriate responses to the individual words, he must sense their interplay upon one another, he must respond to clues of tone and attitude and movement. He must focus his attention on what he is structuring through these means. He must try to see it as an organized whole, its parts interrelated as fully as the text and his own capacities permit. From sound and rhythm and image and idea he forges an experience, a synthesis, that he calls the poem or play or novel.
Rosenblatt wants us to reclaim reading as a deeply personal, human event. Her work is a call to move away from a culture of correct readings and toward one of shared experience, empathy, and critical self-awareness forged through the powerful transaction between a reader and a text.