Michelle Louise Rosenblatt (8 23ro, 1904-02 8va, 2005) fue un crtico literario

estadounidense.
Rosenblatt attended Barnard College , the women's college at Columbia University in
New York City. Rosenblatt asisti a Barnard College , universidad de mujeres en la
Universidad de Columbia en Nueva York. Her roommate was Margaret Mead , the
anthropologist, who motivated her to simultaneously study anthropology. Su compaera
de habitacin fue Margaret Mead , la antroploga, quien la motiv a estudiar al mismo
tiempo la antropologa. Because of her developing interest in this field, she went to
France to study another culture while she earned her doctorate in comparative literature.
Debido a su inters por desarrollar en este campo, se fue a Francia a estudiar otra
cultura, mientras que obtuvo su doctorado en literatura comparada. She then returned to
Barnard to teach. Luego regres a Barnard a ensear. It was during these early
experiences working with college students that she began to develop an interest in a
reader's unique response to text. Fue durante estas primeras experiencias de trabajo con
estudiantes universitarios que comenzaron a desarrollar un inters en respuesta nica de
un lector de texto. Her beliefs regarding literacy were also influenced by John Dewey ,
who was in the philosophy department at Columbia in the 1930s, as well as Charles
Sanders Peirce and William James . Sus creencias sobre la alfabetizacin tambin se
vieron influidos por John Dewey , quien se encontraba en el departamento de filosofa
de la Universidad de Columbia en la dcada de 1930, as como Charles Sanders Peirce y
William James .
She is best known for her influential texts Literature as Exploration (1938) and "The
Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work" (1978), in
which she argues that the act of reading literature involves a transaction between the
reader and the text. Ella es mejor conocida por su literatura textos tan influyentes como
la exploracin (1938) y "El lector, el texto, el poema: La teora transaccional de la obra
literaria" (1978), en la que argumenta que el acto de lectura de la literatura implica una
transaccin entre el lector y el texto. Each "transaction" is a unique experience in which
the reader and text continuously act and are acted upon by each other. Cada
"transaccin" es una experiencia nica en la que el lector y el texto continua actuar y se
acta sobre ellos. A written work (often referred to as a "poem" in her writing) does not
have the same meaning for everyone, as each reader brings individual background
knowledge, beliefs, and context into the reading act. Un trabajo escrito (a menudo
referido como un "poema" en su escritura) no tiene el mismo significado para todos, ya
que cada lector aporta conocimientos previos individuales, las creencias y el contexto en
el acto de lectura. Additionally, she distinguished between different kinds of reading
with her defined "stances". Adems, se distingue entre diferentes tipos de lectura con la
defini "posturas". Rosenblatt placed all reading transactions on a continuum between
"aesthetic" -or reading for pleasure, experiencing the poem-and "efferent" -or reading to
gain meaning. Rosenblatt colocado todas las transacciones de lectura en un continuo

entre la "esttica"-o la lectura por placer, experimentar el poema-y "eferente", o leer

para aprender el significado. Her work made her a well-known reader-response theorist.
Su trabajo le hizo un conocido lector de respuesta terico.
In 1992, Louise Rosenblatt was inducted into the International Reading Association 's
Reading Hall of Fame. [ 1 ] En 1992, Louise Rosenblatt fue incluido en la Asociacin
Internacional de Lectura 's de lectura Saln de la Fama. [1]

Obras

Literature as Exploration (1938). La literatura como exploracin (1938).

Literature as Exploration. La literatura como exploracin. New York: AppletonCentury; (1968). Nueva York: Appleton-Siglo, (1968). New York: Noble and
Noble; (1976). Nueva York: Noble y Noble, (1976). New York: Noble and
Noble; (1983). Nueva York: Noble y Noble, (1983). New York: Modern
Language Association; (1995). Nueva York: Asociacin de Lenguas Modernas;
(1995). New York: Modern Language Association. Nueva York: Asociacin de
Lenguas Modernas.

"Toward a cultural approach to literature", in College English , 7 , 459-466.

"Hacia un enfoque cultural de la literatura", en el Colegio Ingls , 7, 459-466.
(1946). (1946).

"The enriching values of reading". "El enriquecimiento de los valores de la

lectura". In W. Gray (Ed.), Reading in an age of mass communication (pp. 1938). En W. Gray (Ed.), La lectura en la era de la comunicacin de masas (pp.
19-38). Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries. Freeport, NY: Libros para
Bibliotecas. (1949). (1949).

"The acid test in the teaching of literature". English Journal , 45, 66-74. "La
prueba de fuego en la enseanza de la literatura". Ingls Diario, 45, 66-74.
(1956). (1956).

Research development seminar in the teaching of English . Seminario de

investigacin de desarrollo en la enseanza de Ingls. New York: New York
University Press. Nueva York: Prensa de la Universidad de Nueva York. (1963).
(1963).

"The poem as event" in College English, 26 , 123-8. "El poema como un evento"
en el Colegio Ingls, 26, 123-8. (1964). (1964).

"A way of happening", in Educational Record, 49 , 339-346. "Una manera de

que ocurra", en el Registro para la Educacin, 49, 339-346. (1968). (1968).

"Towards a transactional theory of reading", in Journal of Reading Behavior,

1(1) , 31-51. "Hacia una teora transaccional de la lectura", en Diario de lectura
de la conducta, un (1), 31-51. (1969) (1969)

"Literature and the invisible reader", in The Promise of English: NCTE 1970
distinguished lectures. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
"La literatura y el lector invisible", en la promesa de Ingls: NCTE 1970
distingue conferencias:. Champaign, IL Consejo Nacional de Maestros de
Ingls. (1970). (1970).

The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work
, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press (1978). El lector, el texto, El
Poema: La teora transaccional de la obra literaria, Carbondale, IL: Prensa de
la Universidad de Illinois del Sur (1978). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press (reprint 1994). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press (reimpresin 1994).

"What facts does this poem teach you?", in Language Arts, 57 , 386-94. "Qu
hechos se este poema que ensear?", En Lengua y Literatura, 57, 386-94.
(1980). (1980).

"The transactional theory of the literary work: Implications for research", in

Charles Cooper. "La teora transaccional de la obra literaria: Implicaciones para
la investigacin", en Charles Cooper. (Ed.), Researching response to literature
and the teaching of literature . (Ed.), la respuesta de Investigacin de la
literatura y la enseanza de la literatura. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex. (1985). (1985).

"Viewpoints: Transaction versus interaction a terminological rescue

operation", in Research in the Teaching of English, 19 , 96-107. "Puntos de vista:
las transacciones en comparacin con la interaccin - una operacin de rescate
terminolgica", en Investigacin en la Enseanza de Ingls, 19, 96-107. (1985).
(1985).

"The aesthetic transaction", in Journal of Aesthetic Education , 20 (4), 122-128.

"La operacin esttica", en Revista de Educacin Esttica, 20 (4), 122-128.
(1986). (1986).

"Literary Theory", in J. Flood, J. Jensen, D. Lapp, & J. Squire (Eds.), Handbook

of research on teaching the English language arts (pp. 57-62). "Teora de la
Literatura", en J. Flood, J. Jensen, Lapp D., y J. Escudero (Eds.), Manual de la
investigacin sobre la enseanza de las artes del lenguaje Ingls (pp. 57-62).
New York: Macmillan. Nueva York: Macmillan. (1991). (1991).

Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays (2005) Construccin de

significados con los textos: Selected Essays (2005)

Louise Michelle Rosenblatt (August 23, 1904 - February 8, 2005) was an American
literary critic.
Rosenblatt attended Barnard College, the women's college at Columbia University in
New York City. Her roommate was Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, who motivated
her to simultaneously study anthropology. Because of her developing interest in this
field, she went to France to study another culture while she earned her doctorate in
comparative literature. She then returned to Barnard to teach. It was during these early
experiences working with college students that she began to develop an interest in a
reader's unique response to text. Her beliefs regarding literacy were also influenced by
John Dewey, who was in the philosophy department at Columbia in the 1930s, as well
as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
She is best known for her influential texts Literature as Exploration (1938) and "The
Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work" (1978), in
which she argues that the act of reading literature involves a transaction between the
reader and the text. Each "transaction" is a unique experience in which the reader and
text continuously act and are acted upon by each other. A written work (often referred to
as a "poem" in her writing) does not have the same meaning for everyone, as each
reader brings individual background knowledge, beliefs, and context into the reading
act. Additionally, she distinguished between different kinds of reading with her defined
"stances". Rosenblatt placed all reading transactions on a continuum between
"aesthetic" -or reading for pleasure, experiencing the poem-and "efferent" -or reading to
gain meaning. Her work made her a well-known reader-response theorist.
In 1992, Louise Rosenblatt was inducted into the International Reading Association's
Reading Hall of Fame. [1]

[edit] Works

Literature as Exploration (1938). Literature as Exploration. New York:

Appleton-Century; (1968). New York: Noble and Noble; (1976). New York:
Noble and Noble; (1983). New York: Modern Language Association; (1995).
New York: Modern Language Association.

"Toward a cultural approach to literature", in College English, 7, 459-466.

(1946).

"The enriching values of reading". In W. Gray (Ed.), Reading in an age of mass

communication (pp. 19-38). Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries. (1949).

"The acid test in the teaching of literature". English Journal, 45, 66-74. (1956).

Research development seminar in the teaching of English. New York: New York
University Press. (1963).

"The poem as event" in College English, 26, 123-8. (1964).

"A way of happening", in Educational Record, 49, 339-346. (1968).

"Towards a transactional theory of reading", in Journal of Reading Behavior,

1(1), 31-51. (1969)

"Literature and the invisible reader", in The Promise of English: NCTE 1970
distinguished lectures. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
(1970).

The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary
Work, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press (1978). Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press (reprint 1994).

"What facts does this poem teach you?", in Language Arts, 57, 386-94. (1980).

"The transactional theory of the literary work: Implications for research", in

Charles Cooper. (Ed.), Researching response to literature and the teaching of
literature. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. (1985).

"Viewpoints: Transaction versus interaction a terminological rescue

operation", in Research in the Teaching of English, 19, 96-107. (1985).

"The aesthetic transaction", in Journal of Aesthetic Education, 20 (4), 122-128.

(1986).

"Literary Theory", in J. Flood, J. Jensen, D. Lapp, & J. Squire (Eds.), Handbook

of research on teaching the English language arts (pp. 57-62). New York:
Macmillan. (1991).

Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays (2005)

Louise Rosenblatt Interview

Distinguished Visiting Scholar
Department of Teaching and Learning, School of
Education, University of Miami
March 14, 1999

INTRODUCTION: Louise Rosenblatt holds a unique position in the fields of

Education and Literary Studies. She is the most widely cited authority of the

leaders in the field who are presently engaged in the teaching of teachers of
literature or in the researching of the teaching of literature. Her 1938 publication
Literature as Exploration is still in print and is one of the most widely cited
works of its type. In this and dozens of other publications such as The Reader,
the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978), she
outlines a theory of reading as a transactional process. According to her, the
literary work "is not an object or an ideal entity. It happens during a coming
together, a compentration, 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 own resources and crystallizes out from the
stuff of memory, thought, and feeling a new order, a new experience, which he
sees as the poem." (The Reader, the Text, the Poem, p.12). At the heart of Dr.
Rosenblatt's theory" is the idea of the poem as an event in the life of the reader,
as a doing, a making, a combustion fed by the coming together of a particular
personality and a particular text at a particular time (Literature,xvi). In 1992 her
peers elected Louise to membership in the READING HALL OF FAME . In her
dissertation on Rosenblatt's work as a scholar, Gladdys Westbrook Church has
written that "Just as major aspects of the twentieth century have often been
described according to Freudian, Jungian, Einsteinium or Vygotskian theories, a
review of the literature reveals that Rosenblatt has been frequently cited as a
similar authority in the teaching of literature". (Church, 1994, PP. 170-72)
The following interview was conducted as part of a doctoral seminar in
Curriculum Theory and History under the supervision of Professor Eugene F.
Provenzo, Jr. in the School of Education, University of Miami during the Spring
of 1999. The interview project was headed by Philomena Marinaccio, who also
wrote this introduction and formulated the final questions for this interview and
the attached selected bibliography. Other students participating in this project
include: Lydia Barza, Ellen Brown, Aubrey Campbell, Michelle Cash, Lina
Chiappone, Elizabeth Cramer, Keith Grazziadei, and Stephanie King. The
interview was conducted in the home of Professor Eugene Provenzo on March
14, 1999, in Coral Gables, Florida.
Beginning in 1996, Louise Rosenblatt began spending her winters at the
University of Miami as a scholar in residence where she worked in the
Department of English and later in the School of Education's Department of
Teaching and Learning. We have the close friendship between Louise and Dr.
Provenzo to thank for allowing this interview to happen.
Q.We wanted to start with your background. Are there any instances from your
childhood that impacted your interest in reading and literature?
A. The answer of course is yes. Everything seemed to encourage my reading. I
really didn't go to school until I was seven largely because my parents felt that

schools were too regimented. My father had read various and sundry theories
and he thought that children shouldn't be sent to school so early because they
were being regimented too early. We were living at Atlantic City and I guess I
spent most of my time at the beach. So I just enjoyed life. As somebody said,
"You were gathering experiences that you could then bring to understand your
reading". So I learned to read very fast or I taught myself before I came to school
because in a week I was reading in the first grade. I came home about a week
after I had started and I said "I can read" and my parents said "Oh, no". So they
gave me something to read and I read it. I can't recall a time when I wasn't
reading, from the age of seven on. I have an eleven year old granddaughter whose
is a great reader also.
Q.Your graduate work included areas
such as Anthropology and
Comparative Literature. How has
this interdisciplinary training
influenced your work in literacy
studies?
A. I had my B.A.with Honors in
English from Barnard College,
Columbia University. Then I went
on and I had a year in France at the University of Grenoble where I was
assimilating French. I took my doctorate in Comparative Literature at the
Sorbonne (University of Paris) in 1931. By that time I was already teaching in
the English Department at Barnard. When I was an undergraduate at Barnard in
my sophomore year I roomed with Margaret Mead, a senior. She took a course in
Anthropology which was practically a new science in those days. Franz Boas who
was the professor of Anthropology in the graduate school at Columbia and also
head of the Anthropology Department at Barnard College, the women's college.
Margaret took that course and then decided that she was going to ultimately be an
anthropologist. As you know, she became a very prominent one with a worldwide audience. I took Anthropology in my Junior year because Margaret had
been enthusiastic about it. I also
became very enthusiastic. I must say
that everything in my own childhood
had led me up to the point where I
would be enthusiastic about the
importance of the culture and of the
environment in the development of
individuals.
When I was a senior, although I had
majored in English and had my

honors in English, I was faced with a decision as to whether I should go on and

do my graduate work in Anthropology or in Literature. The literature had always
won out. I could have gone to Oxford for graduate work, but because of this
anthropological interest I wanted the experience of another culture. That led me
go to the University of Grenoble to have the experience of a foreign language and
foreign culture.
By the time I got through with my work that year I had become interested in the
idea of "art for art's sake." Some of the French writers like Flaubert, whom I
admired very much, when they were criticized for the moral realism of their
work, took the stand that they were just creating for art's sake and they did not
accept any limitations on what they had to present. I was very sympathetic to the
freedom of the artist but at the same time I did believe very much in the social
role of art. I was very much interested in why these people took this position and
that is the subject that I went up to Paris and prevailed on the professor of
Comparative Literature to approve. I wanted to see what the relationship was
between the French writers who took this position and the English writers who
espoused it. It became a study of English/French literary relations. So you see the
anthropological interest in another culture always has been in the background.
My dissertation (I had to write the book in French) was published in 1931. I
ended my 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.
Q.What major trends and philosophies have contributed to your theory of
literacy?
A. I've become known as, you might say, a representative of the application of
the pragmatist philosophy to esthetics. While I was teaching at Barnard at
Columbia University in the thirties, although I never studied with him, John
Dewey was still a professor of philosophy there. I did meet him and I ultimately
became one of the early members of an organization called The Conference on
Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences that he and other philosophers
organized. In that organization I came into contact with Dewey, Horace Kallen
and a number of the other leading philosophers and people in the social sciences
and the humanities. The meetings dealt with problems of methodology in all of

these areas. The work of Charles Sanders Peirce as well as John Dewey and
William James has been particularly
important to my theory.
Q.You state in your article The
Transactional Theory of Reading
and Writing (1965) that your theory
of the reading process was based on
extensive observations of problems
that arose in the context of
classrooms. What type of classroom
interaction exemplified your
experience as a researcher?
A. My teaching has always been in colleges and universities. I started out
teaching courses in Introductory Literature and Composition as well assisting
with a course on Chaucer. As I began my teaching at Barnard. What I came to
realize was that the kind of training that I had received as an undergraduate and as
a graduate student was all designed to prepare me to become a specialist in my
field, concerned with the analysis and history of literature. I realized that in my
classes most of the people were not going to be specialists in English. The
question was rather, why should other people, who were not going to be
specialists in English, why should they read literary works, why should they be
prepared in the same way as the people who were going to be specialist. I felt
that the needs of the general reader were not being thought of enough. All of the
teaching was really based on what would be useful ultimately to specialists in the
field. It was out of that thinking that I began observing the reading and I also
developed the habit of interchange with my students. I was able to do that
because the head of the department was interested--was favorable to it. So my
research consisted in the observation of all of these different kinds of responses
that the students were bringing and all of the different kinds of blind spots that
they were bringing. I also became aware of the value of the interchanges, the
extent to which they became aware of one another's ideas and found that other
people didn't feel the same way that
they did or had different standards or
different moral attitudes. It was out
of that context that ultimately I
developed my particular approach to
reading.
Q. Would you have classified this
research as being qualitative rather
than quantitative?

A. When you ask me that question, I think it's because even in the social sciences
and humanities, research has usually been thought of as quantitative. Research in
physics was setting the standard. In physics, you can delimit your problem so that
you can regulate the factors involved. You can set the problem in terms that will
enable you to measure things quantitatively. This Newtonian ideal of research
dominated in Educational Psychology and English education when I started out,
and it is still very powerful. Anything that seemed to be personal judgment, or
subjective, was frowned upon, rejected. The need for quantitative measurability
and the tendency to think decontextually about the reader and the text as abstract,
static, had, I believe, an unfortunate effect on testing and teaching. (This research
design is still useful, but the limitations on interpretation of the findings should be
understood.)
But post-Einsteinian physics was
gradually introducing alternative
ways of thinking about our
observation of and our knowledge
about the world. The philosophers I
was associated with were adopting
the ways of thinking about our
knowledge of the world that I have
discussed as transactional. In the first
book in English that I published in 1938, Literature as Exploration, I start out by
saying that when people talk about the reader and the text those are abstractions;
they are fictions. Actually, there are no generic readers, there is no such thing as a
generic reader or a generic text. There are only the individual readers
encountering an individual text, at a particular moment in a particular situation or
context. That event becomes the thing that has to be recognized and has to be
studied. If we are going to have a really effective literary education, it ought to
start with our understanding that.
My quantitative justification was simply that I had been teaching for ten years
and these were ten years of disciplined observation. It was, I suppose, more--what
nowadays is a fashionable name--ethnographic. Also, recall that I was presenting
a theory, which has to be tested against people's own experience and further
systematic testing. This probably will combine qualitative and quantitative
methods.
Q. You have described your main theory of reading as "transactional." In the
field, people frequently refer to it as "reader-response." Why do you prefer the
use of the term "transactional/transaction"?
A. My assumptions behind "interaction" versus "transaction" gets us into the
whole philosophic background of this quantitative/qualitative shift. You see,

Newton's theories and way of approaching research were very useful. No one
denies the importance of the work in Physics that was done under the Newtonian
idea which used the term "interaction." But in that kind of approach everything
can be pre-defined. Einstein brought in a whole different way of looking at the
world. (Trying to be quick about this, I hope I won't say things about science that
are not properly phrased.) It was no longer a matter of being able simply to define
ahead of time what was being studied, because ultimately everything depended
on the observer or the method of observation. In subatomic research, either you
can look at matter and see it as a particle, or you can look at it and see it as a
wave, but always there is the fact that the observer has chosen a particular way of
observing, so that the observer is
always part of the observation.
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.
The continuous reciprocal influence of reader and text is similar, for instance, to
two people talking to one another. What is said at the beginning of the
conversation may take on an entirely different meaning by the end of it. What's
said affects the person who hears it, who then says something response that
affects the first speaker. Rather than two static entites, each person is being
affected in the conversation and what comes next depends on what happened so
far. The same thing is going on between the reader and these squiggles on the
page. Squiggles on the page are just signs. Here I have borrowed from Charles
Sanders Peirce who said that "There is not simply a sign and a signified, but there
has to be some mind, some idea linking them". For instance, in reading the word
"pain" a French reader will link it up with the concept of bread and an English
reader with the concept of bodily or mental suffering. So there would be two
different "interpretants" to use Peirce's term. (He used that term because he didn't

want anyone to think there was a mind with a lot of hard links sitting up there
waiting to clinch things, but that it was connections going on in the mind.). I call
my theory the transactional theory because I wanted to emphasis this dynamic
relationship.
Q. In respect to aesthetic and efferent reading you refer to how schools pay too
much attention to one or the other and never combine them both in studying a
subject. Could you outline what you think is the most appropriate method or
model?
A. I suppose I can continue what I was describing as the reading process because
once you have this relationship between the reader and the text then you see it
becomes very important to realize what each of us brings to that text. We bring a
knowledge of the language. We have to have the same code as the person who
wrote the squiggles on the page, the text. When I use the word text, I mean just
the signs on the page. I was very much influenced also by my work in
Anthropology and Psychology to realize that each of us only brings a part of a
segment of the language, no matter how much we know. In other words, the
dictionary has so-called literal meanings, which is what most people would link
with it, but then it has all sorts of special meanings that words take on in special
context or in special vocabularies and so on. Each of us brings to the text the sum
total of our past experiences with that word. In that I'm summarizing Vygotsky.
Now, Vygotsky understood and emphasized very much the social character of
language. But at the same time he recognized that each of us has only this
personal experience which is the language for us at that moment. When I say our
experience with those words in particular contexts, that means that not only had
we acquired an understanding of a literal meaning but it had been in some special
circumstance, and we have various associations with that word. Or, if the same
word has been encountered in different contexts, we might have had different
associations with it. That means that when the reader approaches the text and
brings to it this reservoir of past experience of language and life, things get stirred
up from this reservoir into our consciousness. We are selecting for attention what
is relevant to our particular needs or interests or purposes at the time. And we are
pushing into the background or
ignoring what is irrelevant.
In reading, the reader is selecting out
from what is being stirred up by the
perception of the signs on the page.
The reader has to select out from past
experiences with those particular
squiggles on the page what is
relevant to that particular context.
The selective activity of the reader,

with particular assumptions, attitudes, and knowledge, becomes very important.

I became aware of the fact that when we read a text as a literary work of art, we
are paying attention not only to what the words point to, their literal referents, but
also to the associations or feelings being aroused. By paying attention to those
associations, we are letting them color the way we are thinking and feeling as we
read. I term this, as you have noted, aesthetic reading.
When we are reading for knowledge, for information, or for the conclusion to an
argument, or maybe for directions as to action, as in a recipe, we are not primarily
paying attention to our feelings, we are reading for what we are going to carry
away afterwards. I term this efferent reading. An extreme example of efferent
reading is a mother whose child has just swallowed a poisonous liquid. She has
snatched up the bottle and is frantically reading the label. She is interested only in
selecting out what to do after the reading is over. In this context, the word "water"
would not bring up the nice associations of water that reading aesthetically
would. So it's a selective activity that's involved.
Another one of my favorite illustrations is the student who was became very
excited about dinosaurs. He wanted to know about dinosaurs, and he wanted to
know what were they really like. He became very annoyed because he said his
teacher kept bringing him "stories." He sensed the difference even though the
teacher thought at that stage of the game it wasn't necessary to differentiate. It is
impotant to differentiate purpose at any point in the learning process.
Also, the same text can be read either way. I can read Shakespeare efferently, I
can tell you how many images of pain there are in King Lear or something like
that. But if I really want to experience King Lear as a tragedy, I have to be
reading it very differently. Not categorizing or labeling. It's often very valuable
to know afterwards, to do it afterwards, after you've had the experience. So I
would say about teaching: whenever you are having students read something,
have them be clear about their purpose. You don't have to give them this whole
theory, but get them used to knowing why they are reading this particular text.
Then they will almost automatically adopt the efferent or the aesthetic stance-that is, pay attention mainly to the experiential or to the informative aspects.
Q.You are quoted as saying (1976) that traditional classroom instruction tends to
downplay the rich cultural experience students bring to the educational arena.
What do you think would be an appropriate model for teaching literacy across
different cultural groups?
A. I think just the points that I've just have been making are relevant. Let me put
it in a somewhat broader context in this way. I think that literature is a
particularly important means of improving multicultural understanding. On the

one hand it can help people to value their backgrounds. On the other hand it can
help them to transcend their experience and to value other backgrounds and other
individuals. You talk about people of different cultural backgrounds. The
multicultural emphasis is right now on giving students things to read that help
them to value their own background. I think that is too limited because they
should also be helped to value other background. I think also, to get back to that
first book of mine, I thought I was writing not only in order to save literature, but
I was saving the world! I felt that democracy was being threatened. I saw what
went on in the English classroom as being very important, because it helped
people to think rationally about things that they were emotionally excited about.
That was what I wanted particularly
to get across.
When you teach reading and you
teach literature it isn't just for them to
have, but it's for them to be,
something thing that they're
emotionally involved in, and for
them to be be able to think about
rationally, to be able to handle their
emotions. All of that enters into my
thinking about multiculturalism.
Horace Kallen, Dean of the New School for Social Research and Alain Locke,
who was a professor of Philosophy at Howard University and also at Harvard,
suggested the term cultural pluralism. I feel that's a much better term than
multiculturalism, because it emphasizes the pluralism but it also emphasizes the
idea of diversity within unity. Of course, the unity is democracy. No matter what
different backgrounds we come from to this country, the reason that we are able
to maintain our own individuality or our own ethnic values is that we are in a
democracy. If we don't value that, we are destroying the very basis for
maintaining the things that we do value ethnically. So I feel that nowadays the
tendency with multiculturalism is to be a little too concerned with asserting
difference and not this diversity within unity which makes diversity possible..
Q.In somewhat the same vein of questioning, why you think your theories are so
well received by feminist and ethnic cultures?
A. If this is so, it is probably because my theory takes in the fact of diversity but
I suppose particularly because it stresses what the individual brings. Gender is is
very much related to the individual's own personal development. That I suppose
is why they welcome the emphasis on diversity within the group. From my point
of view gender like ethnic background is extremely important, but it is
unfortunate if you focus on any one of such factors as being the one thing,

because all of these things are interspersed. Particularly with the feminine, we
ought to make a difference between feminine and feminist. because there are
many feminine traits shared by men and women. I know very macho men who
are the most nurturing people. Now being a nurturing personality is considered a
feminine trait. So it's too bad that nurturing got linked up with gender when that
is a quality that you find spread out throughout the whole. Along with John
Dewey and many other people, I'm very much opposed to dichotomies, to
either/ors. I think that either/ors should be considered poles in a continuity. So
that you have degrees of something. A whole range. So you have something like
nurturing and you might find that there are more women who are nurturing than
there are men who are nurturing. But you wouldn't have nurturing considered an
inherently feminine trait. The present situation may be due to social pressures
rather than gender. Recognizing that things are continuities helps so that after
awhile the whole idea of gender will not be considered male versus female but
the continuities between what is now considered male and female. Different
people are at different points in
physical strength, nurturing, or
whatever.
Most people think of science and art,
or scientific writing and or reading
and literary or aesthetic writing or
reading as being opposities or
contrary. But the efferent and the
aesthetic are poles in a continuum.
Actually, when we read, as I have
said, we engage in a selective process. But that doesn't mean that because you are
paying most attention to the feelings that are aroused by a word, that you are not
also thinking of the literal meaning. The feelings are attached to the literal
meaning. It means that when you are reading that same term in a scientific work
you have to then pay more attention to the literal meaning and push the affective
associations, the feelings aside and ignore them as much as possible. But that
doesn't mean that they are not there, so it's always relative, it's a mix, a
proportion. I have this diagram in which I've tried to represent this, that is you
may increase the amount of attention to feeling and still be reading something
when your main purpose, let's say, is historical. You read a piece of historical
writing and you may have very strong feelings or it may be presented in such a
way as to bring up a lot of images and feelings. But you have to still remember
that your purpose is historical or informational. I have used the illustration of
Ann Lindbergh's The Wave of the Future. She wrote a book saying that fascism
was the wave of the future. She has a powerful image: you can't fight fascism
anymore than you can fight the wave that is looming over you. That's a powerful
image, of that point when a wave is about to break over you. The question is not
whether her image is strong but whether she has given the information, the facts,

the reasoning, the values that would sustain not fighting not doing whatever you
can. If I was faced with that kind of a wave I would dive under it. Maybe I'd go
into the resistance or something. What I'm trying to get at is that I'm opposed to
either-or thinking about reading, when we need to learn how to handle our
emotions, even in mainly informative or efferent reading. Think of
advertisements, political speeches, the newspaper as examples.
Q. In light of your transactional model of reading, where does one draw the line
between the creative, personal interpretation of a work of literature and its
possible misrepresentation?
A. If there is no absolutely single correct answer to what the particular text
means--in other words if the text is not this ironclad set of ideas, if every reader
makes the meaning, does that mean that there is no correct reading?
Deconstruction seems practically at times to be telling us that ultimately every
text can be made to contradict itself. I disagree with that, very decidedly. The
deconstructionists share my premises, they are also relativists. They are post
Einsteinian. But they've jumped at the conclusion that ultimately everything just
ends up at this kind of impasse. (They've been doing a little correcting
themselves lately.) But that was the position they took and a lot of people
swallowed. My answer was, we can always agree on what we consider to be
standards for good reading, for a good interpretation. We can start with, "Is your
interpretation coherent, have you left out and not paid attention to certain parts of
the text, of the signs on the page, that you should have paid attention to," and so
on. Different people read differently, and then we start to defend our reading, but
we do it by going back to the text. That is why the text is important. By the time
the deconstructionists got through with it the text didn't exist anymore, except as
a starting point for sort of fantasy. Whereas I'm saying, you and I may have
different interpretations of Hamlet and you may say to me, "Well, you don't pay
enough attention to the scene with the mother, I have such and such
interpretations of that scene". I'll say, "Well, I fit it into my interpretation in such
and such a way," and we start to see that we both have coherent interpretations. It
may be that then we have to decide on whether we can agree on the basic
assumptions. Maybe you are
psychoanalytic and I don't know
about psychoanalysis. So it may be
that we start to realize that our
criteria are different. So there isn't
confusion, there isn't chaos, but we
have to recognize that there are not
fixed right or wrong, there are not
questions with answers that can be
easily marked as true or false.

Q. You've known a remarkable range of people such as your husband Sidney

Ratner, Franz Boas, Maxine Greene, Margaret Mead, Catherine Bateson, Gregory
Bateson, and I. A. Richards. Can you relate any interesting stories or experiences
about them?
A. It's true, I was sort of fortunate living at a time when I was very young and
there were all of these wonderful people around. Anyway I think I'll tell you
about, I think it was 1929 and I was in Paris. I'd come back for a second stay to
try to finish my dissertation. Through my friend Leonie Adams, who had
published poetry and who had a Guggenheim fellowship, I'd met a number of
young writers and every afternoon we'd go to Ford Madox Ford's apartment on
the Rue de Vaugirard. He's the novelist, and he also had been a great editor. He
had really launched a number of the writers of the twentieth century, such as
Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. Ford gave an at home on New Year's
Day. All sorts of literary names were there. I found myself suddenly next to
Gertrude Stein. I thought that I had to say something. So I said "Miss Stein you
haven't been back to the United States for many years. Isn't there anything that
you miss?" She said "Yes,
Woolworth's".
Q. What about Margaret Mead?
What is your most memorable story
about Margaret Mead?

A. Because we were such close friends for our whole lives, I don't have special
stories. Well, I'll tell you two stories.
In her autobiography, Margaret Mead
tells that when we were at college,
we were part of a group that called
ourselves the Ash Can Cats. But she
didn't explain why. There was Lonie
Adams, who was a senior when I was
a freshman. She had already
published, and was recognized as one
of the best poets in America. (She
went on to hold the post at the Library of Congress that is now called the Poet
Laureate.) She and Margaret were the center of the group. One day, Lonie went
to a class with Professor Latham, a very histrionic teacher of a course in drama.
Lonie, as usual, came in late. Miss Latham--I hope you'll forgive my imitating
her Mississippi speech--turned and said, "You girls sit up all night readin' po'try,
'n come to class lookin' like ash can cats." Lonie came back and told us this
story, and we decided to call ourselves the Ash Can Cats. (I never heard the
phrase before or since). If you are an ash can cat because you read poetry all
night, that's one thing. But somehow, given the overtones of ash can cats, when
Margaret didn't tell why we were called that, I was a little upset. Well, that's one
story.
How many of you know the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay? We used to go
down to the Greenwich Village and have dinner. Those were the days of
Prohibition and we would drink red ink in coffee cups. We would light a candle at
both ends and we would recite Edna Millay's little poem about, "My candle burns
at both ends/ It will not last the night/ But ah my foes, and oh my friends/ it gives
a lovely light". On May Day eve we would make May baskets and we would
hang them on a few people's doors. When I was a senior, I was the last ash can
cat to graduate and we decided we would give our final basket to Edna St.
Vincent Millay. She lived in the village in a little narrow house in a little
courtyard. We went sneaking in and we hung the basket and then we hid behind a
wall. Finally somebody came out and said "Oh, a May basket!" Then the door
closed. So we waited and waited and finally we crept out. Edna St. Vincent
Millay was leaning out the upstairs window, and Leonie was very much
embarrassed that she should find her in this situation.
Q. Would you share some stories about Gregory Bateson?
A. Gregory Bateson was Margaret Mead's third husband. Her second and third
husbands were both anthropologists and she went out into the field and worked
with them. Gregory Bateson came of the most distinguished intellectual

background in England. His father had been a tremendously important scientist.

Gregory was a very brilliant man, very individual. He developed a theory in his
book, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind that I find very congenial because its
really a transactional study. He also had a theory called schizmogenesis which
means something that is born out of conflict or out of division. His point was, for
example, that people who are antagonistic will strengthen one another's
characteristics by their very conflict. Conflict makes each side get more and
more aggressive, more and more violent in their beliefs. The important thing, I
believe, is to try and stop the conflict and try to bring about some transactional
rather than schizmogenic
relationship, to combine his
terminology and mine.
Q.What are your current interests?
A. I'm trying to do a fuller
discussion of my previous discussion
of the theory of writing. But I'm
finding it very hard to write it in a
different way because the writer is
the first reader, and as soon as I use
the word reader I have to explain what I mean about reading. I wanted to talk
about writing first and then reading but I find I'm back to the same order as my
previous essay. The main reason I'm not finishing is that I feel that everything
I've been talking about is so much in danger at the present moment that that's
what one ought to be thinking about. After all if children are tired or hungry or
frightened or the roof is leaking over their heads or what not, for me to be
worrying about whether they are learning to read efferently or aesthetically might
seem to me a little visionary. I said earlier that I thought democracy was
threatened at the time I wrote Literature as Exploration. I think that democracy
is much more threatened now. Then it was threatened more from without and now
it's threatened from within. The public schools and the whole idea of equal
education for everyone are being undermined at the present time by what's
happening both in our national and
state governments. Whatever energy
I have, I ought to be giving to that, so
I've been writing letters which is the
only kind of action that is open to me
at this point.
I have been particularly concerned
with urging that professional and
educational associations should set
up an agency or agencies for quickly

responding to misinformation in the press or to political moves that provide

seeming solutions to current problems but that will have undesirable long-term
effects. I can't take the time here to document the amount of misinformation, of
misinterpretation of statistical data, that even our more reputable media are
disseminating about the actual situation in the schools and the problem of literacy.
What has happened is that we teachers have not communicated with the public
enough, with the parents and particularly with the public that does the voting, to
make them understand what it is we are trying to do for their children. If they
accept some of these quick answers, these speedy answers to educational
problems that are being offered to us, they may seem to be helping their children
but in the long run they are going to create a world in which their children are
going to have to live, where there will be terrible differences in wealth, in
education, in health and in every other way. I feel we really have to be devoting
our time and efforts to criticizing these short-sighted political solutions, and
demanding revisions. that's why I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I have this urge
to constantly try to explain what I am driving at in my own thinking about
reading and writing. On the other hand, I feel that all of us ought to be concerned
about this broader political, economic problem. I've seen cyclic changes, but in
this cycle, maybe because of the economic affluence and concentrations of
wealth, we find ourselves greatly at the mercy of people who may be very good at
making or collecting money but who may not understand children or society or
education. They've got the money, however, to propagagandize their particular
notions, sometimes well-meaning but neglectful of long-term educational and
social efforts, We've got to at least rally numbers in the political arena.

Recuperado el 27/9/2010 de la World Wide Web:

http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Rosenblatt/