Ann E. Berthoff

For anyone old enough to have been a student before the mid-century mark, one of the pleasures of reading Louise Rosenblatt is encountering old friends-interesting minor figures like Maud Bodkin, Rosamond Lehmann, and Gordon Allport, as well as giants like Dewey, Franz Boas, and Edward Sapir. It is not a matter of nostalgia but of recalling a time when the philosophy of education was more concerned with ideas than with data. It is inspiriting to read Rosenblatt because her conviction that critical theory and classroom practice are philosophical to the core is voiced on every page. For younger readers, one of the chief benefits is to be set straight about certain events and movements and schools which have been in recent times badly misunderstood and wantonly misrepresented. She was one of the first to recognize the significance of I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism, to understand what the purposes of the New Criticism were and how certain of the proponents of this critical practice derailed the enterprise. For all readers, there is the pleasure of reading straightforward prose about the importance of literature in our lives and the logical, psychological, pedagogical, and political reasons for beginning with the reader's response.

Defining the context for Rosenblatt's theory of the reader's role takes us to the heart of American philosophy. It would be salutary for contemporary critics to turn to Rosenblatt's explanation of her principal ideas because they will find there a more authentic understanding of C.S. Peirce and William James than they will get, say, in reading one American academic's interpretation of another's reaction of a British expositor's rendition of an idea gleaned from a European critic's uninstructed reading of Peirce. Sometimes cross-cultural exchange can be generative, as when Martin Luther King, Jr. found in Gandhi what Gandhi had taken from Thoreau who had gathered it, in part, from Eastern mysticism. But the reheated, refiltered, decaffeinated criticism currently available is neither generative nor instructive. Reading Rosenblatt brings us closer to the genuine sources of some of the most significant concepts in contemporary philosophy.

I want to claim that Rosenblatt exemplifies pragmatism at its best. The student of John Dewey and a careful reader of William James, she is attractive to both logical and psychological dimensions of theory and practice. Further, Rosenblatt is at home with what Jakobson called Peirce's "revolutionary doctrine of the Interpretant." The interpretant is the idea that mediates the symbol and its referent; it is part of the sign, an element of the meaning relationship. It is held, generally speaking, by an individual person, but Peirce was very reluctant, except as "a Sop to Cerberus," to conflate the person and the idea because he did not want to lose the point that interpretation is logically constitutive and not a psychological additive. In Peirce's semiotics (he reclaimed the term which he spelled semeiotic), the meaning relationship is three-valued, triadic: Interpretation is entailed in signification. Saussure's signifier-signified, in contrast, is two-valued, with th interpretation seen as a psychological additive. Modem linguistics derives from Saussure and tends to be centrally concerned with neither meaning nor interpretation. Understanding the two varieties of semiotics is crucial to understanding how and why Rosenblatt's theories differ from other varieties of what is generally called "reader response" theory.

Naming the theory which holds that the reader's response is important in many different senses is not easy: "reader response" is slightly pleonastic, for from where else would there be a response? But of course the point is not what phrase we decide on but what we mean by it. A pragmatic understanding takes active, interpretative practice as the chief consequence of triadicity: If all knowledge is mediated, then we must continually interpret our interpretations. If there is no direct access to reality, truth, or any other absolute, then we must look to our practice to mediate our understanding. If we apply the pragmatic maxim–what difference would it make to our practice if we hold thus and so?–the advantages are immediately apparent. For the pedagogical implications of reader-response theory are very rich indeed, and it is for her careful exploration of them that we have chiefly to thank Rosenblatt. Three distinctions provide points of departure for that exploration: interaction/transaction, text/poem, efferent/aesthetic. In all cases, a triadic conception supplants a dyadic one: transaction, poem, and aesthetic stance are, in Rosenblatt's hands, thoroughly triadic, thoroughly pragmatic. I will consider them in the order named.

To affirm that the individual consciousness embodies forces that transcend the biological organism, that there is no sharp division between the subjective consciousness and its object does not require dispensing with the vital, dynamic, active, empirical self. (The Reader, the Text, the Poem 172)

The self is, Rosenblatt contends, not a "construct," but neither is it an autonomous entity. This is consonant with what Peirce meant in saying that Man is a Sign: he is Thirdness to the facts of the Universe.

Experience is always social and it is active: it is not a collection of responses to a collection of stimuli. Experience is, for one thing, the memory of acts and events, represented in images of all sorts. The fact that Rosenblatt draws upon the Ames perception studies is evidence that she has seen how "the prime agent of all human perception"-Coleridge's famous definition of Imagination-is active and creative. Along with an anthropologically sophisticated understanding of language, there is a theory of imagination which underwrites her reader-response theory; indeed, her theory could be said to bear about the same relationship to " affective stylistics" and "subjective criticism" as Imagination does to Fancy.

In calling the experience of reading a transaction, Rosenblatt is recognizing interpretation as a process of meaning-making. It is a nonlinear, dynamic, dialectical process in which we continually interpret our interpretations. Response really begins not with the "response" but with the student's reflection on the response. Her thoroughly pragmatic sense of what is "valid" in a reading puts the emphasis on seeing what difference taking part of a text this way would make to the rest of it. This critical respect for how the reading of one line or image or passage will necessarily affect the way we read other elements of the text is an expression of the same principle which guides I.A. Richards in his insistence on the possibility of distinguishing "variant readings" from "misreading." Thus, Rosenblatt and Richards share an understanding of recognizing, identifying, and evaluating textual constraints on the reader's response: they both follow the pragmatic maxim. Solipsists should take notice-and those for whom some vague notion of an "interpretative community" has supplanted the well-formed concept of transaction.

If there is a drawback to the term transactionand I think there is it is that some may interpret it as tending to reify the text, to suggest a power and position equal to that of the reader. Like the more up-to-date term negotiate, it may imply two parties of equal status. Now it may be that the reader and the writer have this relationship, but the author is not in the picture in reader-response models. To see the transaction as taking place between a gabby reader and a gabby text always reminds me, rather, of the stomach talking to its owner, the thoughtless consumer of pepperoni pizzas in the Alka Selzer ad. The presentation of reader and text as copartners in a transaction may seem to represent a dyadic semiotics The transaction is actually between varying interpretations, starts and stops, as they are constrained by an ever-deepening appreciation of the limits of language represented in the text, in dialectic with the experience the reader brings to the reading. Rosenblatt's emphasis on this interdependency of openness and selection reminds us that her hermeneutics, like her semiotics is triadic and pragmatic. Awareness of this can protect us from misconceiving what transaction is meant to express.

Just so, in her differentiation of text and poem, Rosenblatt is mindful of what Richards calls "the problem of initial terms." Rather than speaking of a text as "essentially" or "actually" or "really" traces of graphite on processed pulp, or some such circumlocution, Rosenblatt begins with symbols:

'Text' designates a set or series of signs interpretable as linguistic symbols. I use this rather roundabout phrasing to make it clear that the text is not simply the inked marks on the page or even the uttered vibrations in the air. The visual or auditory signs become verbal symbols, become words, by virtue of their being potentially recognizable as pointing to something beyond themselves. Thus in a reading situation "the text" may be thought of as the printed signs in their capacity to serve as symbols. (The Reader 12)

And when we recreate the text as poem, those verbal symbols are interpreted, their meanings construed. For this reason, a theory of reading must have a working concept of discourse as well as a philosophy of language: Words and letters are not the initial terms of discourse, meanings are.

It has been a chief contribution of hermeneutics to shift the focus of critical theory from abstract definitions of discourse to the nature of the reading process, from rhetoric to interpretation, if you will. Schleiermacher, generally credited by those who chart intellectual currents as the founder of a general theory of hermeneutics, held that we construct the text by means of a "grammatical" approach but that to penetrate to the inner form, we must rely on the "divinatory" power. And he meant nothing mystical: this power is ours by virtue of our common human experience. It seems to me that Rosenblatt is instructive and inspiriting when she is discussing the transactional stance which entails just such a dialectical method, but when she turns to what purports to be two kinds of reading she is less certain of their relationship.

In the case of this pair, efferent/aesthetic, by the time Rosenblatt has explained how both can play a role in reading either literature or mathematical formulae, one might wonder if they are worth keeping. Efferent sounds too close to reading out which, with reading in, constitutes a pernicious dichotomy. The notion that first we neutrally decode "the words on the page" and then we respond is at odds with Rosenblatt's teaching, but the term efferent rather distracts us (me?) from her sense that the reader responds from first to last in terms of his or her experience. For Rosenblatt, the reader responds by means of the meanings he or she brings to the text, as well as by means of the meanings which emerge in the process of reading. Taken with aesthetic, efferent might suggest, in the absence of a triadic conception of the sign, that meaning making is being deferred. Aesthetic raises as many questions as it argues, in my opinion, though Rosenblatt began as an aesthetician and knows what she means. She insists on the experience of art, the lived-through experience; she also recognizes that we take away from reading literature something other than what we take away from reading a label. If we remember that efferent and aesthetic are meant to be taken together, that it is not a matter of sequence but of focus, these terms can serve us in our thinking about the reader's response. Two other pairs of terms can illuminate Rosenblatt's distinctive pair. One is Wolfgang Iser's wandering eye/focus. Mariolina Salvatori has given us an excellent explication of this concept and has noted the pedagogical implications.² And I hope someone will investigate Rosenblatt's distinction in the light of C. S. Lewis's between use and receive.³ Iser's pair opposed mutually dependent activities; Lewis's are mutually exclusive. We are asked to renounce "use"-reading for message or comfort-and to cultivate instead the habit of receiving what literature has to offer.

One source of confusion is, I think, that Rosenblatt's pair sometimes functions like Iser's and sometimes like Lewis's, but it's what she does with her concepts that counts. Rosenblatt's conception of the aesthetic stance guides her in a brilliant critique of E. D. Hirsch's attempt to deploy Frege's Sinn (significance or import) and Bedeutung (referent) for purposes which, as she explains, Frege excluded (The Reader 111-112). All philosophers must make a stab at differentiating not only what-is-said and what-is-meant but also the modes of representing both what-is-said and what-is-meant. Frege knew that the relationship of these two aspects in works of art is not of the same sort as that relationship in scientific statement. What I.A. Richards wrestled with for forty years; what Wittgenstein despaired of figuring out, counselling silence at the end of the Tractatus; what Susanne K. Langer labored to develop, a philosophy of presentational form-what others have seen as one of the most challenging philosophical problems of the twentieth century, E. D. Hirsch meets by muddling and misapplying terms. Rosenblatt provides as good protection as anyone I have read against such "gangster theories" (Richards' phrase) as are represented by Professor Hirsch's authorial intention, which he identifies with th Frege's Bedeutung. There are other gangster theories which she can help us defend ourselves against, such as that "structuralist poetics" which sets meaning aside in order to study the codes and conventions that make meaning possible or that deconstruction which Paul de Man proclaims as the mission of literary study in years to come, the collapse of poem into text. Getting rid of the interpreter or destroying what he or she is meant to interpret are variants of a view of language as a substitute for reality and of literature as only self-referential. As she discusses the actualities of reading, it is clear that Rosnblatt begins, as Vygotsky advises, with "the unit of meaning" and that she suffers from no irrational anxiety about the impossibility of ever knowing what is meant directly, by revelations or no-fault decoding.

Rosenblatt's theory of reading is, like Paulo Freire's pedagogy of knowing and I.A. Richards' philosophy of rhetoric, informed by a trust in what Coleridge called "the all-in-each of human nature." And because of the way she conceives of language and literature, learning to read is the means of leaming virtue:

When we are helping students to better techniques of reading through greater sensitivity to diction, tone, structure, image, symbol, narrative movement, we are also helping them to make the more refined responses that are ultimately the source of human understanding and sensitivity to human values. (Literature as Exploration 290)

With Rosenblatt as our guide, we will recognize and celebrate the social contexts of literature, confident that her theory of literature will protect us from "using" it, from teaching for message. I began by claiming that Rosenblatt is a thoroughgoing pragmatist, and that that is why we have from her such sound guidance for our practice. Her trust in the power of the mind; her commitment to honest and open questioning and discussion; her understanding of the political importance of learning to tolerate not only other people's opinions but ambiguity itself: these are, of course, not exclusively American traits, but when they are found in conjunction with belief in democratic values we certainly want to claim them as American. Rosenblatt closed one book with John Keats and the other with Walt Whitman and that makes the symbolic point: her love of beauty is joined by her teacher's passion for literature as exploration, as the best way to open up democratic vistas. In her important essay, "Whitman's Democratic Vistas and the New 'Ethnicity,'" Rosenblatt beautifully shows us how responsive reading authentic interpretation reclaims the hermeneutic bond of individual and community, what Schleiermacher saw as the way each person represents humanity in his or her own way.

Whitman enjoins upon us an active selectivity, a testing, a rejection of all derived from an ancestry that is alien to the special needs of a free society.... Whitman shows us the man and woman accepting themselves in all their uniqueness, honoring their own roots, but free to reach out in all directions to their fellow humans.

Rosenblatt makes me proud to be an American.

¹ For Father Ong, transaction is only an ongoing interaction. This profoundly positivist conception trips him into contradiction: "An interpretation," he writes, "is shaped by the text as a given reader interacted with it." A few sentences later we find him saying that "a text reacts not at all to any interpretation." The second statement is clearly true, if you take the text out of any dialectical relationship with emergent discourse, and it negates the first statement, since interaction surely entails reaction.

² See "The Pedagogical Implications of Reader-Response Theory," Reader 16 (1986): 1-19.

³ See An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961).

Here is one of Lewis's explanations:

A work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used! When we receive it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we 'use' it we treat it as an assistance for our own activities. The one, to use an old-fashioned image, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know roads we have never yet explored. The other is like adding one of those motor attachments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides. These rides may in themselves be good, bad, or indifferent.... 'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves, or palliates our life, and does not add to it. (88)

Richards, I.A. "Variant Readings and Misreading." So Much Nearer: Essays 
		Towards a World English. New York: Harcourt, 1960. 183-200.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. "Whitman's Democratic Vistas and the New 'Ethnicity.'" 
		Yale Review 67 (1978): 199-200.
Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. Trans. Alex Kozulin. Cambridge:  
		MIT P, 1986.