Clifford, John. "Introduction: On First Reading Rosenblatt." Reader 20 
		(1988): 1-6. <http://www.hu.mtu.edu/reader/online/20/intro20.html>. 

John Clifford

This issue of Reader focuses on the transactional theories of Louise M. Rosenblatt. When proper histories of the reader-response movement are eventually written, Rosenblatt's Literatureas Exploration (1938) is sure to be cited as the inaugural text. That many informed theorists today still do not know this impassioned defense of real readers is either an indication of the myopia of a lingering formalism or the literalness of the ivory tower. A rereading of this early book in our current poststructural climate is a bit odd, deja vu with a rhetorical twist, as if someone were writing a lucid overview of how the ideas of Fish, Holland, and Iser might be clarified and made relevant to students, without elaborate theoretical scaffolding. The reason for this familiarity is not mysterious: Rosenblatt's ideas about the dialectical simultaneity of the reading process, about the contextual complexity of language in its social and private dimensions, were simply a generation ahead of their time. Unfortunately, she was a victim of such circumstances as the dislocations of World War II, the impact of Sputnik, and her own pellucid discourse. And by victim I simply mean the absence from critical discussion in university English departments of the text's theoretical merits. It was, however, always a vital and valued guide among high school teachers frustrated with the aridity and remoteness of formalist reading. Her ideas were also well known and respected among professors in progressive schools of education. After having been trained as a close reader in the mid-sixties, I was rapidly becoming just such a frustrated instructor.

I heard little sustained conversation in graduate school about readers, beyond a passing reference to catharsis or the affective fallacy. Even in the late sixties, in the waning of the formalist paradigm, a serious interest in readers, especially the messy, untrained responses of students, was still a slightly perverse activity, perhaps a symptom of an even greater eccentricity–a commitment to democratic teaching. As a novice scholar and instructor, I had been socialized to believe that associating one's reading with the actual world, or worse, with one's passionate inner life, was emotional self-indulgence, solipsistic, and unscholarly (I think unmanly was also lurking in the background). Subjectivity and objectivity both seemed clearly definable and separate. The former was to be extirpated, root and branch; the latter was to be rigorously embraced. How hermetically sealed this New Critical notion of textual autonomy now seems, how repressed was the seemingly neutral and precise methodology of close reading. And, of course, how oblivious to the implications of contradiction, how unconcerned with the real reasons for difference.

Along with this philosophical innocence and political suppression came inevitable constraints on teaching, constraints that denied the relevance and authority of experience. I felt acutely the irony that an approach to reading that was originally conceived of as an antidote to the diminution of humanistic values in an increasingly bureaucratic culture would itself become a source of fragmentation and alienation. How was it possible to discuss Whitman and Shelley while also ignoring the social upheaval swirling in and around the high schools and universities of the sixties? What innocuous role in society was already carved out for those who privileged the textual artifact over the experience of reading?

I think it was finally a pervasive distrust of authorities of all sorts that led academics to a skepticism and then a rejection of rigidly constructed systems of official policy in government and in the university. The old ways just would not serve any longer; consequently, traditional notions of coherence and meaning were intensely problematized. Eventually, the a priori authority of the text became widely suspect, and the way was thereby open for thinking hard about how reading actually proceeds. All of which foreshadowed the rejection of formalism and the rise of various participatory reception theories. As the social and political consensus went sour, so too did my ability to teach or read in the old ways. It was simply too frustrating, too pedagogically detached, too politically unconscionable. I shared Louis Kampf's disappointment that the New Criticism "affected no one."

I longed for a new perspective. Fortunately, I discovered Literature as Exploration, and my reading and my teaching have never been the same. That neither I nor anybody I ever talked to in graduate school ever heard of this text is, I think, a representative anecdote for the insularity of graduate training in English before 1970. Rosenblatt's belief that a spontaneous, emotional reaction to literature was "an absolutely necessary condition of sound literary judgment" had the immediate ring of truth to it. As through a glass darkly, I began to see that I had been studying and teaching literary criticism, substituting the authority of the text for an exploration of the experience of reading. Instead of allowing myself and my students to confront their own varied responses to texts, I was making us all invisible, forcing students out of an allegiance to a critical tradition to repress deeply embedded values, ideas, emotions, and socio-political beliefs. The irony, of course, was that this repression was only on the surface and only for the masses: New Critics still read with their isolationist values intact; they still privileged aesthetics and devalued the sociopolitical. So finally it was everyone else's values that were ignored. Is it any wonder that this trained incapacity to be fully engaged alienated students from reading literature?

The pedagogical beliefs that followed my adaptation of Rosenblatt's transactional dynamic between the text and the reader were immediate and empowering. The voices of the canon could now be put in dialog with the voices of my students. Poems became less artifacts than sources for potential works of art, not discovered but dialectically created in the classroom. And what I have never forgotten, what lingers still in the intertextual crevices of all my critical reading, is the sense of psychological wholeness that I felt when I realized I did not have to split my inner life and my work, my socio-political values and my professional ethos. I could simply read the text as I read the world, with the same personal commitment, the same desire and need to understand, but without the certainty that it all needs to make sense, that there must be eventually coherence, that there is an ultimate intentionality one needs to uncover. After the stunning epiphany that the process of reading was synecdochical of larger perceptions of the world, reading began to seem crucial, a way of being in the world. And for students it was a way to make meaning, and they soon realized that whose meaning prevailed had social and political consequences in reading the riots in Watts, the violence in Vietnam, the complex motivations involved in university demonstrations, as well as in reading Shakespeare or Eldridge Cleaver. Rosenblatt simply allowed me to believe in the transformational potential of reading, writing, and discussing texts with students. Now some twenty years later, after the profession has exhibited an intense interest in theory and has developed a renewed concern for our political responsibilities, I see even more vividly the rich intellectual and psychological possibilities of response oriented reading and teaching. Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theories of reading offer us the best chance to do serious intellectual work with a democratic conscience. We may want to supplement her basic principles with theoretical concerns from the richness of poststructural insights, but when we do blend cultural, feminist, political or psychological theories, it bears remembering that the foundation, the essence and spirit of the reader's importance, were championed first in her work. More than anyone, Louise Rosenblatt provides us with the necessary critical and ethical apparatus for reading texts.

Louise Rosenblatt opens this special issue of Reader with a new essay that she read at the Conference on Reading and Writing in Urbana, October, 1986. Her primary purpose is to recapitulate her transactional theory while also presenting "a coherent theoretical approach" to the connections between reading and writing. To those not familiar with her work, the present piece provides a lucid overview of some key ideas. And for the growing number of literary theorists wondering about writing theory, Rosenblatt's effort here to sketch relevant interrelationships can be seen as a tacit invitation to join her in the work of cross-fertilization.

The other four theorists in this issue read Rosenblatt's work as they would a literary text–through their own preoccupations and concerns. And that, of course, is how it should be, must be, if there is to be intellectual growth. Theories are simply interpretations of other interpretations and as such are imbued with our own conscious and unconscious values and beliefs. It is, therefore, crucial for us to engage and critique other theorists, since it helps them and us clarify our ideas through dialectical readjustments. This is the spirit of the intellectual conversation that works against the flatulence endemic in hegemonic accommodation. That spirit animates these essays.

Carolyn Allen gives us a much-needed retrospective on Rosenblatt's career and some of the problems involved in her academic acceptance. She also reminds us of Rosenblatt's early insistence on the connections among the text and the social, psychological, and cultural life of readers. Although the long-standing bias against practical application of theory, that is, actual classroom teaching, has diminished in recent years, I think Professor Allen is cogent in locating Rosenblatt's isolation in the academy in the pragmatism of Literature as Exploration. In fact, all of the contributors make note of the powerful influence the American pragmatists have had on her work, from John Dewey to C.S. Peirce and William James. It must be amusing to Rosenblatt that progressive thinkers as diverse as Richard Rorty, Frank Lentricchia, and Henry Giroux are now focusing on the contributions of Dewey some fifty years after she affirmed his centrality for democratic reading and teaching.

Ann Berthoff's essay is yet another example of the vitality of Rosenblatt's text and the humanistic energy of Berthoff's reading. After the long and depressing reign of positivist educational theory, Berthoff needs to remind us that it was not always so: that some educators were always concerned with the life of the mind. The Rosenblatt seminars I was in during the early seventies, for example, were about ideas, about philosophical inquiry, about multiple meanings, intention, and democratic values. And Berthoff recognizes this because her work is also about the mind, about the necessity of the reader to mediate between the symbol and the referent, between the word and reality. Since this is a constant theme in Berthoff's own reading and writing theories, she knows that Rosenblatt is also concerned with triadicity as a corrective to dyadic formalism Both theorists are positing active, engaged readers, situated in a social world badly in need of thinkers who can tolerate ambiguity and who understand the cultural seriousness of their meaning-making responsibilities.

Kathleen McCormick's reading of Rosenblatt represents a significant gesture for the response movement, since she clearly represents a new generation of scholars comfortable with poststructural literary theory. Instead of Dewey and Peirce, her influences are more likely to be deconstructionist, neo-marxists, French feminists and other proponents of rigorous, eloquent, ideal constructions of the reader. Yet, because she is also interested in teaching, McCormick can see how critical Rosenblatt's real reader is, how much the quality of the literary experience depends on authentic responses from that quiet young woman by the window. And so McCormick reads her theory dialectically, Barthes in dialog with Rosenblatt: The result being that Barthes' textual preoccupations are modified by shifting pleasure, bliss, and jouissance to the reader–Rosenbarthes! McCormick's study of her students' active, self-conscious critique of their meaning-making capabilities is intrinsically interesting, but in a larger sense it demonstrates yet again Rosenblatt's belief that "[t]he transactional concept can only reinforce interest in the dynamics of the relationship between the author, the text, the reader, and their cultural environments" (The Reader, the Text, the Poem 174).

Alan Purves, a noted researcher in response theory, has long been interested in the ways the human mind experiences art. In his consideration of the significance of Rosenblatt's psychological aesthetics, he touches on several provocative themes, including offering a corrective to I.A. Richards' protocol studies in Practical Criticism. Purves maintains, correctly I believe, that texts are "mediated experiences" which can be used to challenge the mind and its values, and by extension, our professional values and our unexamined cultural presuppositions. I. A. Richards assumed that his students erred in their reading, instead of seeing the more significant lesson that his students could not avoid using the knowledge already in their heads. They had not yet been trained to read as dutiful members of an interpretive community by adhering to some a priori formulation of a correct reading. Purves is keenly aware of the impact training can have and bemoans our culture's obsession with propositional reading and its concomitant disregard for the aesthetic. I especially like Purves' emphasis on stance and its power to determine how we read. Since stance is largely responsible for the formation of our currently limited canon, it is one of those seminal concepts that we need constantly to interrogate. For after all, we read texts not only for what they tell us about the world and ourselves, but because by being attuned to their aesthetic possibilities, we are more fully engaged, more fully alive to the possibilities of our existence. It is this aspect of Rosenblatt that renews my belief that the vitality of the transactional experience can be the basis for the important work reading, writing, and teaching must do in the world.

University of North Carolina