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Lousie Rosenblatt Annotated Bibliography Books

Rosenblatt’s 1931 dissertation is written in French. She specifically chose to do her graduate studies in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne in France in order to learn more about another culture(s), furthering her anthropological interests. Her dissertation formed the foundation for her major reader-response theory. In essence, Rosenblatt contemplates the theories of “art for art’s sake,” to include an active role by the common reader of any literature, a theory she would continue to expand and refine. In an interview, as part of a doctoral seminar at University of Miami, Rosenblatt comments: I ended my [dissertation] study by saying there would be tension between society and the artist so long as readers didn’t understand what writers of literary works of art were doing. What an artist was trying to do was different. They needed to understand that if an artist presented an image of behavior it didn’t mean he was saying that was the way that you ought to behave. He was trying to tell you that that’s the way people behave. So I became interested in readers within this context so that both the literature and the anthropology coincided to create my interest in the teaching of literature and then ultimately in all kinds of reading, literary and otherwise. So that’s how I came into literacy, and why although I have a doctorate in comparative literature, I came to reading theory. (Marinaccio)

Rosenblatt’s second book expounds further on her reader-response theory. “Over the years she continued to refine her theory, and in the 1968 edition she officially named it her ‘transactional’ theory of literature in her Preface to that second edition” (Church 86–87). The transactional approach displaces the New Critics’ theory that nothing exists outside the text. Each time a reader engages in a text there is a transaction that occurs between the two, one in which all the experiences of the reader influences his or her understanding and interpretation of the material. Furthermore, there are two types of reading: efferent and aesthetic. In chapter one, Rosenblatt asserts that the thesis for the book is “that no contradiction should exist between these two phases of art [efferent or aesthetic]—that, in fact, they are inextricably interrelated” (22). Instructors or critics who insist on either perspective having a higher value over the other restrict the literature itself and the reader’s understanding. Additionally, social and cultural awareness will also serve the reader with a deeper understanding. Rosenblatt draws from John Dewey’s influential Art as Experience and his theories regarding the impact of aesthetic values in our daily lives.

Rosenblatt continues to refine her transactional theory. Her third book includes work from previously written essays: “The Poem as Event” (1964), “A Way of Happening” (1968), and “Toward a Transactional Theory of Reading” (1969). Again, emphasizing the unique event between reader and text, any reader at a specific time may interpret a text according to the specific circumstances, or mindset, in which he or she is. These circumstances might include socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, as well as culture. Rosenblatt provides overwhelming scientific and philosophical support rebutting other theories. Detailed explication of the reading process focuses on evocation, interpretation, and evaluation of texts. Additionally, the efferent and aesthetic critical dichotomy is further transformed through Rosenblatt’s objective/subjective criticism resolution, in that “the reader-critic savors as fully as possible his personal evocation during the lived-through transaction with the text” (174).

Published approximately two weeks before Rosenblatt’s death, this work is a compilation of some of her most influential essays and is organized into three sections: “Theory,” “Practice: Education,” and “Practice: Criticism.” In her “Preface,” entitled “To My Readers,” she recommends to those unfamiliar with her work should begin with the “Practice: Education” section. She also clarifies why her past emphasis has been on the reader’s role in the transaction, but this emphasis “should not be dualistically misunderstood as implying that the reader alone determines the text” (xi). Each essay was published previously in scholarly journals and is annotated in detail below. The articles in bold below are included in this book, as well as one interview.