TRANSACTIONAL READING IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

In this chapter, the author sympathizes with teachers who are thrilled if their students become “lost” in a text and can’t wait to discuss a poem in class. But he finds it difficult to accept if this is as far as they feel they need to take their students, and the author concerns if they cite Louise Rosenblatt as their reason for stopping there. In 1949, Arthur Bentley and John Dewey published Knowing and the Known, in which for the first time they described human experience and understanding of the world as a transactional process and contrasted it to two previous historical views, self-action and interaction. Rosenblatt codified her views as a theory of reading with the publication of The Reader, the Text, and the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, which, in keeping with other theories of reader response at the time, focused on the reader as central to textual interpretation.