Purves, Alan C. "The Aesthetic Mind of Louise Rosenblatt." 	
	Reader 20 (1988): 68-77. 
	<http://www.hu.mtu.edu/reader/online/20/purves20.html>. 

Alan C. Purves

In writing about the contributions of Louise Rosenblatt to the intellectual history of the United States and to the history of the teaching and study of literature, I should like to show where I think she stands in a long stream of psychological aesthetics. As an aesthetician, she concentrates less on the nature of beauty and issues related to the genre and judgement than she does on the nature of the way in which the human mind experiences art. Rosenblatt acknowledges her indebtedness to Dewey and Bentley's Knowing and the Known. But her close selfidentification with Dewey had the unfortunate consequence, I think, of having an aesthetic position confounded with a series of educational practices carried out in the name of Dewey. The fact that Rosenblatt was read with an eye to pedagogical implications and that she held a position in education served to confuse the unwary reader.

Her first major work in English, Literature as Exploration, appeared in 1938, shortly before the publication of an equally famous work on the reading of literature, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. To a great extent, that volume, like Rosenblatt's, shows the influence of a volume written a decade earlier which remains one of the seminal books on the reading of literary texts, I.A. Richards' Practical Criticism. One of Richards' major findings was that his student readers tended to approach the works they read with what he calls "stock responses," "mnemonic irrelevancies," "doctrinal adhesions," "technical preconceptions," or "general critical preconceptions." To Richards, the idea that half of the topologies of "failure in reading and judging poetry" came from the fact that readers were not blank slates when they read a poem was a matter of some concern, particularly because their particular filled slate did not match his. They tended not to be the "objective" readers that he had hoped the universities were training.

One might argue that Brooks and Warren also wrote from a concern with what was in their student readers' heads. They proceeded to demonstrate this concern by following each poem with a series of adept questions that could lead students to become dispassionate analysts of literary texts. Following from Richards' discovery, they effected a pedagogical experiment in producing close if not "scientific" readers. To a great extent they were successful with at least two generations of American students. Their work was imitated in Europe by various structuralists and post-structuralists, particularly in France and Belgium.

Rosenblatt elaborated the same concept, that readers come to texts with a set of preconceptions, but approached it from a different perspective, concentrating on the human concerns of the texts and the readers more than on issues of style, language, and structure. Her source was not Richards but the variety of philosophers and anthropologists she had been reading since her undergraduate days at Barnard. One might say that the idea was "in the air." She tended to look for counters to the "art for art's sake" approach that she had studied in her thesis at the Sorbonne. Although some might put her in the Freudian camp and see her approach as similar to that of Simon Lesser in Fiction and the Unconscious, such an interpretation would be misleading, I think, for notwithstanding her focus on content and on the relationship between reader and text, she does not see the reading of literary texts so much as a form of therapy or escape as a set of mediated experiences which can be used to challenge the mind and its values. Broadly psychological in focus, she is not, in any strict sense, a Freudian, and she rejects bibliotherapy in the classroom. More important than her concern with the substance of the text is the way in which she turns Richards' ideas around. What is in the reader's head is not erroneous, but a necessary part of reading. It becomes a given of her definition of the reader.

Rosenblatt's reversal of Richards is, to my mind, one of the main contributions of her early work. The very act of interpretation is the relating of the text to a set of known structures in the reader's head. To be sure, there can be misinterpretations and misapplications of knowledge. But the fact of erroneous interpretations does not negate the basic principle that interpretation is driven both by the reader and by the text. The idea of the active use of prior knowledge in reading literature, a main theme of Literature as Exploration, is the point of the reader-response critics whom Rosenblatt anticipated by some thirty years. The reading of the text is an active event; it necessarily entails the bringing of prior knowledge to bear upon what is read. What is in the head cannot be the object of censure or praise: it is and it results from prior experience, prior reading, and prior teaching. Readers cannot avoid using this knowledge and cannot avoid entering into a transaction with the text that makes the result particularly theirs. To say this is not to deny the possibility of general perceptions and readings but is to assert that these general readings are always modified by human individuality.

If we turn the calendar forward to the 1970s and the publication of The Reader, the Text, the Poem, Rosenblatt's second major text, we find that work appearing at about the same time as the work of the cognitive psychologists who advanced the theory of human thinking known as schema theory. This theory bears a remarkable resemblance to the premises underpinning the work of I.A. Richards (despite the fact that Richards was clearly influenced by behavioral psychology) and Rosenblatt's transactional theory. Schema theory states that people acquire schemata, frames, or scripts (each of these terms has been used) concerning various real-world phenomena either from prior reading or from direct experience, and these schemata affect the ways in which they read various texts. In general, the schemata set forth by the cognitive psychologists are described in terms of the context of the texts, whether they have to do with restaurants or prisons. One of the more noted experiments uses a text that can be read as a description of a prison break or a wrestling match depending upon which schema is activated by a cue in the text (Anderson).

At about the time that schema theory became ubiquitous in the psychological literature concerning 'Ming reading, Rosenblatt's The Reader, the Text, the Poem appeared. In it, she set forth the idea that when readers read, they are indeed bringing various preconceptions to bear on the text, among which preconceptions are some that deal not solely with the content but with the form, structure, or style of the text. Just as she presented a corrective to the formalist tendencies of Brooks and Warren, so she was bringing a corrective to the content emphases of the schema theorists. They had looked primarily at contrived passages of prose and at deliberately ambiguous texts concerning prisons or wrestlers; some even denied that texts like poems were susceptible to their theory. Literary texts are not "schema driven" but imaginative. It is difficult for a literary person to understand this vague distinction, and Rosenblatt clearly shows that all texts were so susceptible.

It is clear from various empirical research studies concerning the reading of literature that Rosenblatt's formulation is correct. One may of course argue that research in response to literature was so influenced by her work that it managed its evidence to support her theory. I happen to think that the former is the case. Beginning with I.A. Richards, and continuing with the work of James Squire, Arthur Applebee, Norman Holland, Charles Cooper, and myself (see Purves and Beach 1972), there is a steady stream of findings that readers bring something with them when they read texts. What they bring is a sense of the appropriate content of literary texts, as well as a sense of the structure, form, and style of literary works. The range of prior knowledge, schemata, frames, or prejudices (depending upon which terminology one employs) is broad and not confined to content as some of the psychologists would have it. Among the kinds of knowledge are that concerning content as reflected in phonology and rhythm, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, text structures of genres, emotional nuances and tones, and symbolic or mythological patterns. Readers have a vast array of knowledge in their heads, and they bring that knowledge to bear on the transaction that is the meeting of the reader's mind with the text. It is impossible for a reader to make a claim, whether it be considered right or wrong, concerning the relationship of the tall soldier in Crane's The Red Badge of Courage to Christ without a fair amount of knowledge concerning language and literature, not to mention knowledge of the ways in which it is appropriate to read literary texts and interpret them. Richards' categories of preconception concerning content, form, emotion, and critical stance apply today, and I think that Rosenblatt would accept all of them as aspects of the intellectual baggage that readers carry with them. She would also be less certain than others as to the superior value of one type of baggage over another. One could argue that the particular sort of prior knowledge that one brings to bear on the transaction depends upon the particular circumstances of the text, the situation of the reader, or the setting in which the transaction occurs. Whereas Richards deplores excesses of emotion and rigid application of formal precepts, I do not see Rosenblatt as arguing that there is a "best amount or type of prior knowledge."

All of what has preceded would make Louise Rosenblatt an interesting but not a formidable figure in twentieth-century aesthetics. But she is precisely formidable because she adds one important dimension to the transactional approach and the idea of prior knowledge. It is a dimension that leads from psychological aesthetics to general aesthetics. Readers bring to texts not simply critical preconceptions as Richards suggested, but dispositions as to how to read texts; they can choose between efferent and aesthetic reading (to use her powerful terms). Rosenblatt here elaborates and turns into a crucial aspect of psychological aesthetics a distinction that Richards touched upon but did not elaborate. The distinction refers to seeing the text as primarily referential or as primarily poetic. A referential text is to be read efferently; one is to take the information in the text and internalize it as knowledge about something, or as a set of injunctions to belief or action. Aesthetic reading, by contrast, focuses not on the message of the text, but upon the text itself as a self-contained artifact. In such an artifact, message and form are totally incorporated, and the reader attends to and contemplates the totality without seeking knowledge or determining consequent action. Aesthetic and efferent readings are kinds of readings that readers make. That is why some of Richards' "stock responses" are, upon further examination, misplaced efferent readings, instances where the students take as tracts what he and others see as poems. This failure is, in one sense, a failure to draw upon the appropriate procedural schema for reading certain kinds of texts. I do not think that efferent and aesthetic readings exist on a continuum, although some critics do. To me, they appear to be poles between which a reader may oscillate during the course of reading a given text, and the sum total of reading may tend on "average" to be seen as aesthetic or efferent.

From my various studies of the ways by which students respond to literary texts, I would contend that the penchant for aesthetic reading is learned; certainly it is driven out of the heads of readers by instruction. In the cross-national study of student response to literature (Purves 1973), we found that both after reading short stories and in the abstract, students in the United States reported that the questions they would prefer addressing dealt with the surface and symbolic meaning of the text and with the moral to be derived from it. By contrast with students in England and New Zealand as well as in several European countries, United States students aged fourteen and seventeen saw the message as the most important aspect of short stories and by extension of fiction and literature in general. This tendency became more solidly advanced as one moved from the younger to the older students. These same questions were the ones preferred by secondary school teachers. A later study we undertook indicated that these questions were not the same as those addressed by much younger students (Purves and Monson 1985). That this is a general failing among students in the United States results, I am sure, from a constant pedagogical pressure to read all texts efferently, because teachers, following the penchant of the general populace, believe that all texts have a moral. I would go so far as to assert that a large number of our literary critics have also lost the ability to read aesthetically. A great deal of academic criticism, even some that comes under the heading of "reader-response criticism," is efferent moralizing. One can see an emphasis on content in the work of critics as diverse as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Henry Nash Smith, and Judith Fetterly. This criticism also tends to view literature as dealing explicitly with moral issues and themes, with messages of one sort or another. That such a view of the text is so dominant may well explain why Rosenblatt is not as well recognized as she should be. Aesthetic reading is not popular in academe.

Rosenblatt shows that how we read a text depends upon what is in our heads, just as much as the meaning or emotion we gain from reading the text. Aesthetic or efferent reading is, as she argues, a matter of stance. We can choose how to read a text or a portion of a text. In a study that I conducted with Harry Broudy a few years ago, we set out to examine what he refers to as the uses of learning. We used several passages from The New York Times on diverse topics, heavy with allusion, as well as a poem, and asked students in the first year of graduate school to read them and comment upon them as they read. The students were selected on the basis of their background, so that we had an artist, a dancer, and a student each in the humanities, in engineering, in law, in commerce, in social sciences, and in the hard sciences. The results indicated that the students tended to use various kinds of prior knowledge when they read, much of it indirectly. Broudy had hypothesized that we use knowledge replicatively, applicatively, interpretively, and associatively. The latter two are seldom tested in school, yet the use of prior knowledge to interpret new phenomena and the use of that knowledge by recalling an association with something new are clearly parts of the transaction of reading whether it be efferent or aesthetic. So it was we found among all our readers, that those who did not have some knowledge about the text's topic found themselves unwilling to or unable to read the text with comprehension. But the finding of that study most germane to Rosenblatt's point about stance was that the sort of learning that occurred most frequently in our protocols was not what but how. In most instances we found that our subjects had learned certain "mannerisms" of reading (for want of a better word), such as one student's immediate distrust of anything that contained metaphor, or another student's manner of reading all literature that derived from the critical theory of Maritain. On subsequent interviews these readers recalled precisely where they had learned to read certain texts in the ways that they did. If these particulars of stance are learned, it would appear plausible that one can learn to read a text aesthetically or efferently. Perhaps it is Safer to assert that one can learn that it is or is not appropriate to read aesthetically. How we read is a matter of stance, which is a matter of choice.

And it is precisely here that psychology leads to aesthetic principle, for if how we read a text depends upon what is in our heads, then how we read a text can determine the individual and collective apperception of the text. It is this principle that explains how it is that there can be such phenomena as "found poems" or Pop Art as well as how it is that people can shoot actors portraying villains. That is to say, if one reader reads Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech as a prose poem, experiencing the text for itself and what it does to the mind at the time and relishing that experience, for that reader the speech becomes poetic. It is clear from recordings of the speech that although it is a political document to be taken efferently, King's style of delivery as well as the text itself led some people to listen aesthetically, at least in part. Some heard the message as a call to action concerning civil rights; others heard the "music" of the speech without taking a specific message from it. If a sufficient number of readers read aesthetically, the text may well become accepted as a part of the literary canon. The text may no longer be read efferently by a large number of readers. That has been the fate of many texts whose local origins are all but forgotten. It has not happened with King's speech as yet. But one hopes there may be a time when it need not be read efferently. To a certain extent such has been the fate of many "topical" works such as the satires of Swift or some of the essays of Carlyle or Arnold; the information that they once contained is obscure to the modem reader, and it may be immaterial. When the works were written, the information and its relevance seemed paramount to all concerned. To be sure, these works can be resurrected for their historic topicality, but for most readers, the aesthetic reading does not depend upon that topicality. To make this argument is not to deny the importance of the content of these works, but the content has ceased to be referential, and the work is not seen as the repository of information.

Literature, then, comprises a body of texts which a reader, or a group of readers, finds necessary to read aesthetically. Clearly a part of the burden is on the text or group of texts; yet a part of the burden is on the readers. For readers in many cultures, certain aspects of the text serve as a cue, and the fact of wide margins and capital letters at the beginning of each line can cue a reader to be disposed to read a text aesthetically. Readers have acquired a knowledge of many of these cues which become part of their schemata and by which they associate text types with dispositions as to how to read. Yet they can also pick up a text which has none of these cues, such as a piece of prose in a newspaper, and after reading a few lines, find themselves reading the text aesthetically, making it a poem. If that happens on a sufficient number of readings by a sufficient number of readers, that text may be seen as a "work of literature." It may even become a part of the canon. The canonical properties of literature, then, arise less from the texts than from the shared perception of readers. Thus we cannot assert that any text is necessarily literature. We also cannot deny to any text the possibility of being considered literature.

As I remarked earlier, Rosenblatt's theory makes it possible to understand that, by the same token, a reader or a society of readers can depoeticize a text. The most common version of this sort of transformation occurs in instances where large numbers of readers choose to treat a text as a tract rather than a poem and seek to ban it. Such is the recurrent case with The Merchant of Venice and even with folktales such as "Jack and the Beanstalk." It would appear that a large portion of the American population does not or cannot read most texts aesthetically; it is not part of the Calvinist tradition, a tradition that pervades our schools, both common and critical. Beginning with the basal reading text, children are asked for the main idea of the text. That is the end of reading. Later on the terms are changed to theme. In addition, teachers tend to be encouraged to see children's literature as containing a moral; that is the best justification for including it in the curriculum. Given these tendencies, no wonder that children are pushed into the efferent mode. It is hard to select the aesthetic stance when there has been no encouragement for so doing.

From Louise Rosenblatt, then, comes a more synoptic view of psychological aesthetics than from most other theoreticians of reading and criticism. She sees that the perceived text is related to the perceived world as well as to the reader. The reading of the text is a mental event determined in great part by the reader, but also clearly affected by the nature of the text. The reader is not independent of the text nor the text of the reader. More importantly, however, the way in which a text is read, which is to say the stance that one adopts towards the text, is as important as what is derived from or adduced to the text. One may see the reading of texts as an individual matter, as she clearly claims. Yet she also provides the theoretical underpinnings for our understanding that how we read texts is also a social or cultural matter. The cross-national research that we undertook in the 1970's showed that styles of responding to texts characterized national groups of students. In each of the ten countries, students tended to become increasingly alike within an educational system, but not across educational systems. They also tended to become like their teachers, who less closely resembled the leading critics of the country. It was clear that in some countries aesthetic reading tends to be encouraged, if we can assume that the questions students ask reflect the stance which they adopt while reading. Other research, such as that of Broudy and Beach, tends to support this assumption.

The expressed response to literature is a social action, and an action that often occurs in school. The reader is never an isolate save at the very best moments of aesthetic reading, when the societal pressures have been put aside in those moments of aesthetic surrender that is poem making. Even then, society may affect what happens after reading and force the aesthetic reader into being an efferent critic. Too much efferent criticism can undermine the capacity to read aesthetically. To my mind that has happened in the United States, and it is difficult to change this state of affairs since it is very much in the American grain, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out over two decades ago. Louise Rosenblatt's aesthetic lies clearly in the mainstream of twentieth-century aesthetics, particularly European aesthetics. Its existence and its reception remind us of how we might read literature were our culture not against such reading. As an aesthetician, then, she provides us with a vision of how both the individual reader might read the variety of literary and non-literary texts and how a culture might reinforce the broadened perspective of generations of readers. Such a vision has clear educational ramifications, some of which have been captured in literature curricula in various parts of the world.

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