Wednesday morning

I teach today. About literature and writing and how it is we [and our students] make meaning for ourselves.

We will be talking about Louise Rosenblatt's notions regarding her "transactional theory of reading and writing" which helped to define and expand upon our understanding of both how it is we place ourselves next to the texts we read and the texts we write, which she calls "stance taking", and what transpires within this space between the reader/writer and the text. According to Rosenblatt, the reader/writer's stance is comprised of her/his "linguistic-experiential reservoir" which is made up of all of her/his social, cultural, historical and academic experiences. As a consequence of this transaction or interaction between an individual and a text, an evocation [a new text] comes forth, which, in turn, is interpreted by the individual. It is this one of a kind interpretation that represents new meaning for the [individual] reader/writer.

Louise Rosenblatt had a distinguished career as a literary theorist, historian and critic and a shaper of pedagogical philosophy regarding language and meaning making. I first read her work as a new graduate student. She inspired me with her words and images about her thinking and her [both] contemplative and scholarly ways of presenting her ideas.

Here is an excerpt from a talk Rosenblatt gave in 1999:

John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley said that the notion of "interaction" was perfectly good, and still is good, for particular purposes, but we need a new term, "transaction," for the relationship that exists between the human organism and the world.

When I read Dewey and Bentley's Knowing and the Known in 1949, in which they suggested "transaction," I said: "That's the perfect term for the relationship between the reader and the text that I've been describing all along." We don't want to start out thinking of the reader as a static entity and the text as something that already has the fully-formed meaning in it. Reading is "transaction," during which each is continuously affecting the other. I suppose ecology is the field in which people understand this best--that human beings are affected by the environment, but they are also affecting it all the time, so that there is a transaction going on.

Louise Rosenblatt in 1938