Rosenblatt's The Reader, the Text, and the Poem

As I was reading the first three chapters of Rosenblatt's The Reader, the Text, and the Poem, I had the idea that transactional theory was more about an emotional response by the reader to the text. However, Rosenblatt corrected my idea at the beginning of chapter 4: "Even as we are generating the work of art, we are reacting to it" (p.48). As we react emotionally to a text, we also recognize patterns and look for unity.  I like the idea of "contextual ambiance" (p.85) that is created by various elements in the text and that affects the way we feel while reading a text. Recognizing literary or poetic devices is a way to name and organize the emotional responses we have to a text, and this practice does connect the cognitive to the affective (p.92-94).

Rosenblatt says that the "analyst is not reading the text in order to create a work of art; he is reading efferently in order to make a systematic classification of elements" (p.89). Do we sometimes train students to read that way? When we do, we take away the experience of encountering a work of art.

I have had trouble the past few years with teaching formal analysis while still recognizing the text as a work of art, as Rosenblatt says. I wrote last week about how in my teaching, I sometimes separated the readers' responses from the "more serious" analysis. Rosenblatt has made me think about how the recognition of various aspects of the text should grow out of the reader's response and the way the reader shapes the text and organizes the text through the reading process. Rather than a formal anlysis, it becomes a "heightened awareness" or "admiring recognition" (p.69).

I have thought much in my teaching and writing lives of writing as a craft, yet I have not thought much about reading as the same. I am interested in Rosenblatt's comparison of how the writer crafts the text to the "reader's own unique form of literary creativity" (p.50) as he or she puts the text together again through reading. I have not thought of reading as an act of creativity, but it absolutely does require imagination and crafting, just as writing does. Revision is also present in both activities, something else I have not thought much about (p.61). I don't think we talk with students much about revision in the reading process; does that give students the idea that they must have a "right" or "perfect" reading the first time through?

As I was reading about the components of aesthetic reading, I thought of some questions to ask students about their reading processes (as well as questions I could ask myself as a reader):
- Are you experiencing fulfillment or frustration of your expectations? (p.54)
- Have you read a text like this one before? How is this one similar or different? (p.57)
- What clues do you see in the text that are affecting the way you are reading it? (p.57)
- What memories, present preoccupations, sense of values, and aspirations of your own are entering into relationship with the text? (p.81)
**This question is a good reminder of how much experience, personal and literary, that we all bring to texts (p.86).
- How is the author directing your attention? (p.86) (not to be confused with author's intention from chapter 6)

Two of my favorites snippets from Rosenblatt:
"We are living in the world of the work which we have created under guidance of the text and are entering into new potentialities of our own natures" (p.68).

"The reader feels himself in communication with another mind, another world" (p.86).