scholarly journals An Ethical Ideal? Louise Rosenblatt and Democracy—A Personalist Reconsideration

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Richard Vytniorgu
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
John R. Shook

Louise Rosenblatt (b. 1904–d. 2005) was a highly influential thinker in literary and critical theory, reading pedagogy, and education. She was professor of education at New York University from 1948 until 1972, and she continued to teach for many years at other universities. The impact of her writings extends to aesthetics, communication and media studies, and cultural studies. Her transactional theory of reading literature earned a permanent place among methodologies applied to the study of reader comprehension and improving the teaching of reading, from preschool to college-age years. She is most widely known for her “reader response” theory of literature. The process of reading is a dynamic transaction between the reader and the text, in which meaningful ideas arise for readers from their own thoughtful and creative interpretations. Her first book, Literature as Exploration, which was published in 1938, has gone through five editions and remains in print in the early 21st century. Her last book, Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays, was published in 2005 and contained selected essays from each decade of her career. Rosenblatt’s view of literary experience threw down a challenge to a dominant paradigm during the 1940s and 1950s, namely the New Criticism. New Criticism held that authentic meanings of a piece of creative writing—a novel, story, drama, poem, and so on—are already within the text itself, requiring attention to that somewhat concealed yet objective truth. Rosenblatt took the pragmatist approach, starting from the aesthetics of reading. As a member of the Conference on Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences at Columbia University during the 1930s, she studied John Dewey, Charles Peirce, and William James. During this time, she married the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Ratner. Rosenblatt applied her knowledge of pragmatism to the question of understanding creative writing. For pragmatism, all experiences are creative fusions of intersecting processes, some from within and some from without. Any comprehension of a text blends the reader’s particular approach for appreciating it together with the capacity of the text to provoke a variety of stimulating ideas. The emotional and the factual are rarely found in pure forms; only a gradual range from the affective to the cognitive can characterize lived experience. Understanding the process of reading in its fundamental experiential situation has been a revolutionary philosophical position, impacting both childhood education and literary theory. Rosenblatt’s work continues to inspire fresh academic research and curricular innovations.


Author(s):  
DeNel Rehberg Sedo

The digital era offers a plethora of opportunities for readers to exchange opinions, share reading recommendations, and form ties with other readers. This communication often takes place in online environments, which presents reading researchers with new opportunities and challenges when investigating readers’ reading experiences. What readers do with what they read is not a new topic of scholarly debate. As early as the 14th century, when scribes questioned how their readers understood their words, readers have been scrutinized. Contemporary reading investigations and theory formation began in earnest in the 1920s with I. A. Richards’s argument that the reader should be considered separate from the text. In the 1930s, Louise Rosenblatt furthered the discipline, using literature as an occasion for collective inquiry into both cultural and individual values and introducing the concerns for the phenomenological experience of reading and its intersubjectivity. While there is no universal theory of how readers read, more recent scholarly discourse illustrates a cluster of related views that see the reader and the text as complementary to one another in a variety of critical contexts. With the advent of social media and Web 2.0, readers provide researchers with a host of opportunities to not only identify who they are, but to access in profound ways their individual and collective responses to the books they read. Reader responses on the Internet’s early email forums, or the contemporary iterations of browser-hosted groups such as Yahoo Groups or Google Groups, alongside book talk found on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, present data that can be analyzed through established or newly developed digital methods. Reviews and commentary on these platforms, in addition to the thousands of book blogs, Goodreads.com, LibraryThing.com, and readers’ reviews on bookseller websites illustrate cultural, economic, and social aspects of reading in ways that previously were often elusive to reading researchers. Contemporary reading scholars bring to the analytical mix perspectives that enrich last century’s theories of unidentified readers. The methods illustrate the fertility available to contemporary investigations of readers and their books. Considered together, they allow scholars to contemplate the complexities of reading in the past, highlight the uniqueness of reading in the present, and provide material to help project into the future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Yuet Zhou Tan ◽  
Azlina Abdul Aziz

The study of literature provides a civilizing effect on a society anywhere around the world. Through these English kinds of literature, there are aspects of English culture encapsulated in it. This could potentially help students to develop as global citizens, which understand not only the feelings, settings, culture and even thoughts conveyed through the literature but being able to apply it to the real world, as a global citizen. If young students are not able to get such valuable exposure in schools, where are they supposed to receive such valuable input? Through this study, it is aimed to provide an overview of how foreign literature English novels chosen by the Ministry of Education has expanded the students' perspective as a global citizen. This paper aimed to reveal the challenges faced by teachers in using these texts in completing the objectives of producing students as global citizens. Thus, by applying Louise Rosenblatt Transactional Theory, it scaffolds this study to examine the challenges faced by English teachers in incorporating global citizenship values through the teaching of foreign novels in English. Data was collected via classroom observations, document analysis and interviews on both teachers and students. The data collected from the interviews, observations and item analysis were analyzed and results were conveyed in different themes, on the challenges faced by the respondents.�


La Palabra ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Claudia Patricia Bolívar Calixto ◽  
Aurora Gordo Contreras

El escrito relata los resultados de la experiencia de un proceso de investigación en la Maestría de Literatura dentro de la línea de investigación Creación y Pedagogía de la UPTC en el año 2013. Suobjetivo principal fue acercar a los jóvenes de grado décimo de la Institución Educativa Silvino Rodríguez hacia la lectura literaria placentera a través de la aplicación de estrategias para la iniciación literaria, buscando promover la motivación, el gusto, el enamoramiento de nuevas formas de pensar, de mirar y de crear a través del disfrute estético que produce la lectura. El diseño metodológico se enmarcó dentro de una investigación cualitativa de tipo descriptiva-explicativa, con un diseño cuasi experimental. Los referentes teóricos se sustentan en autores como Louise Rosenblatt, Michele Petit, Teresa Colomer, Jorge Larrosa y María Helena Robledo entre otros. Los datos fueron recolectados a través de ejercicios con los estudiantes, profesores y padres de familia. Se hizo un análisis de las categorías halladas en la prueba de encuestas, una evaluación de los resultados, junto con las estrategias utilizadas, y finalmente se presentan unas conclusiones de la investigación.Palabras clave: lectura, literatura, estrategias, mediación, lenguaje.


2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Ariail Broughton

This study examines the performance and construction of subjectivities of four early adolescent, sixth-grade girls as they read and discussed a novel about two adolescent Mexican children seeking a new life in America. Using data gathered through ethnographic methods such as participant-observation, interviews, dialogue journals, and book club discussions, the author describes the participants as they performed their subjectivities in various contexts, focusing specifically on their performances while reading and discussing the novel in book club groups. The girls' conversations about themselves suggested that they engaged in ongoing constructions of their subjectivities as they interacted with the text and with each other. Analysis of data was inductive and was informed by theories of experiential response as developed by Louise Rosenblatt and others. The discussion groups provided a fertile environment in which the girls could reflect on the text, share responses, argue opposing viewpoints, and negotiate shared meanings. During the discussions of the novel, the girls debated a variety of personal and social issues, sometimes recognizing and verbally acknowledging shifts in their values, beliefs, and attitudes as they negotiated meanings and clarified understandings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 853
Author(s):  
Nguyễn Minh Nhật Nam ◽  
Châu Huệ Mai ◽  
Trần Phát Đạt ◽  
Nguyễn Thị Ngọc Thúy

 Lí thuyết tiếp nhận là một trong những cơ sở xây dựng định hướng Chương trình Ngữ văn (CTNV) 2018 của Việt Nam về dạy đọc hiểu văn bản văn học; do đó, lí thuyết này cần được vận dụng vào thực tiễn dạy học đọc hiểu văn bản văn học ở trường phổ thông một cách đúng đắn. Độc giả-phản hồi (ĐG-PH), một nhánh của lí thuyết tiếp nhận, cho đến nay đã được vận dụng sâu rộng vào việc dạy học đọc hiểu ở trường phổ thông của nhiều nước trên thế giới. Bài viết nghiên cứu các nguyên tắc và biện pháp vận dụng lí thuyết ĐG-PH vào việc khai thác và phát huy phản hồi văn học của học sinh (HS) trong giờ học đọc hiểu văn bản văn học theo CTNV 2018. Phương pháp nghiên cứu được sử dụng là phân tích và tổng hợp lí thuyết, nhằm làm rõ nội hàm khái niệm “sự tương tạo thẩm mĩ” (Louise Rosenblatt) và “cộng đồng diễn giải” (Stanley Fish) trong lí thuyết ĐG-PH, phân tích định hướng của CTNV 2018 về dạy học đọc hiểu văn bản văn học, tổng hợp các cơ sở lí luận để đề xuất các nguyên tắc và biện pháp dạy học cụ thể cho giáo viên (GV) phổ thông. 


Author(s):  
Shuangnan Wu ◽  

This study is about reader response to feminism in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (2006). The topic is analysed under the guidance of reader-response theory proposed by Louise Rosenblatt. The objectives of this study are twofold: first, to collect related readers’ response to feminism on the Goodreads website, one of the biggest and most famous book review websites worldwide; secondly, to discuss readers’ underpinning views towards feminism and their expectation for women in the 21st century. This paper seizes on qualitative research. The primary data of this study is gleaned from the Goodreads website. Other sources of data include literary works, book rating websites and news reports. The conclusion is that feminism is deemed as self-indulgence or a kind of self-discovery by different readers and such fact reflects, to some extent, what people expect for women in the 21st century.


2020 ◽  
pp. 107780042093592
Author(s):  
Owen Bullock ◽  
Lucinda McKnight ◽  
Ruby Todd

Three poet-researchers conduct three different readings of Tishani Doshi’s poem A Fable for the 21st Century. We ask how as creative practitioners and critics we can negotiate the desire for mastery of a text, and the dangers a semiotic reading presents, allowing for difference, indecision, and complexity. We present our initial readings of the poem and summarize our discussions of them grounded in the transactional reading theory of Louise Rosenblatt and nuanced by assemblage theory. A final section includes three original poems written in response to Doshi, together with a brief discussion of them, and forms part of our conclusion.


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