Years ago, as a student teacher, I was faced with the chore of having teaching high school juniors a book that I absolutely hated as junior: The Scarlet Letter. I had dim memories of slogging through the first third before giving up and faking my way through discussions of the rest of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s antiquated, lifeless prose. The stale comings and goings of ancient characters made me want to jump out the huge picture window in my English classroom and start running. The only thing that had stuck with me was how old the book seemed, how remote from me.
But being a 27-year-old reader is not the same as being a 17-year-old reader, and within minutes of reopening The Scarlet Letter again, I found myself riveted. Hawthorne’s prose wasn’t stale – it was fresh and vivid. The characters, who’d once seemed about 300 years old to me, suddenly drew into focus for what they were: young and vital, really the same age as I was. There was the sex, the lust — all of it simmering right below the surface, the chilling jealousy of the aptly named Chillingworth, the heroism of Hester Prynne in not giving up the name of her paramour. And then of course the remarkable sophistication – genius, even – of Hawthorne’s complex portrayal of the way that guilt can borrow into the human heart. If I’d had any doubt I wanted to be an English teacher that semester, it was gone within a few pages of rereading this old classic.
And this same experience has persisted ever since, throughout the 16 years I’ve been an English teacher: rereading something that had made almost no impression on me when I was younger has shown me that understanding and appreciating literature is something that changes very much depending on what we bring to the reading. There are simply some books, I’ve come to believe, that you must be a certain age to truly understand. Reading is an experience, not a simple filling up of ideas at the literary gas station, not a basic “downloading” of content into one’s brain. Books take on a life of their own depending on what we bring to the reading. I simply could not understand Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmsdale when I was 17, just as I could not – it occurs to me now as I look back on it – really understand most adults in general as people – they were remote and beyond me: authority figures, mainly. This is the nature of experience, after all – it is a process of sorting and sifting and seeing-only-what-we-can-see in our lines of vision. Reading is simply another mode of experience.
Louise Rosenblatt
If there’s one reading theorist who understands this, it’s Louise Rosenblatt, a former English professor, and a luminary in the world of English Language Arts instruction for her formalization of the theory of reader-response: basically the idea that the nature of our reading experience involves a transaction between the reader and the text. Reading is not the passive absorption of information, the same each and every time, but an experience that is lived through, never to be repeated again in the exact same way. This theory stands in contrast to several others, including the notion – once espoused by the New Criticism movement – that the meaning of a text resides solely in the text, and that the reader’s job is to unlock and discover this one, single meaning. It stands, too, in opposition, perhaps, to a variety of ideological ways to read a text – by using a “lens,” for instance – to do a Marxist reading, or a Freudian reading. For Rosenblatt, readers understand the text in often very personal, idiosyncratic ways, especially young readers, who have less experience with the types of situations or personages represented in books, and whose reactions are less mature and more emotional. Reading is not an unlocking of a mystery, a search for hidden meaning, but an active process of construction of meaning, a filling in of gaps in our understanding with the best we have, the creation of inferences based on our own experiences and knowledge. She memorably terms the reader-text transaction as a “live circuit set up” (24).
For years I kept seeing Rosenblatt’s name referenced by modern-day English teacher-writers. Names like Penny Kittle often cited Rosenblatt in their books. And since I had never actually read Rosenblatt’s landmark 1933 book Literature as Exploration, but had read excerpts before, I was eager to finish the job. I’ve just completed it, and I found it to be fresh, insightful, and beautifully written. It is a classic in the English Language Arts field.
Reader Response
The first thing I noticed is that John Dewey’s influence is strong on Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt terms the relationship between reader and text in the reader response theory a “transaction” – not the attraction and repelling of two seperate, fully formed compounds, but a true give-and-take, a melding of two malleable substances, each one changing and being changed by the other one. Dewey would approve. Just as for Dewey democracy is not a form of government, but an active practice, for Rosenblatt what she calls “aesthetic” reading – which is deep, meaningful reading (as opposed to “efferent reading” – which is quick, business-like reading) – is an experience, rather than simply an activity. As she writes in the book, efferent reading may be done for us – someone may summarize a chapter in a biology textbook, or even the plot of a great novel, but no one can aesthetically read for us – no one can give us the experience of being carried away by a good book. Just as in the case of my two very different readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, it is we ourselves as readers who bring our own feelings, preconceptions, experiences, prejudices, and preoccupations to our reading experiences. And it is for this reason that no two reading experiences are the same, and also why true aesthetic reading is such a dynamic, meaningful experience.
Why Lit Study Matters
And it is also for this reason that Rosenblatt believes that literature study in schools – done well – is so powerful for students. Literature – properly chosen to speak to the preoccupations and questions of adolescents – can provide rare opportunities both to teach students about themselves and the world in an effecting, emotional way, and – most provocatively – can provide the a Dewey-ian opportunity for students to learn to better manage their daily experience – their approaches to new situations and new people. This is all in opposition to the goals of traditional literature study teaching at the time, which Rosenblatt suggests aims to teach students primarily about the technical aspects of the work, rather than the deeper, more important messages. Rosenblatt’s arguments toward both of these points are deep and sophisticated, and merit drawing out in depth.
Rosenblatt starts from the belief that students are naturally hungry for knowledge and searching for answers and that the reader is looking for information all about him as to how best to live his life. Each reader’s experiences, questions, and preoccupations are in his mind as he tucks into a new book: “He comes to the book from life,” she writes (33). And although the choosing of literature that speaks to students is a difficult task for teachers, in Rosenblatt’s view – particularly given her beliefs about the idiosyncratic nature of each student’s highly individualized transaction with books – she believes that a well-chosen book has the power to move students on an emotional level, which provides two benefits for students.
Modifying Students’ Responses
First, Rosenblatt recognizes the importance of emotions in changing student beliefs and behaviors. Literature has the power to move us emotionally and therefore has the power to teach us valuable lessons through its emotional impact. This is a point stressed by many other thinkers, but Rosenblatt takes it a step farther by emphasizing that literature is not only emotional, but represents an “experience.” She writes that it is a “living through, not simply knowledge about” (38). She writes that “through literature, [we] acquire not so much additional information as additional experience” (38). For these reasons, literature conveys new understandings – whether of a different time period, of person or group, or of a theme or focus – much more deeply than does reading about it in a textbook. There is emotional and even experiential impact on the reader or student.
Second, the emotion that literature stirs up in us creates a Dewey-ian stimulus toward problem solving – a discomfort that requires action to solve (Rosenblatt even quotes Dewey in this section). And here is the jumping off point for many of Rosenblatt’s most interesting educational goals. She believes that the reading teacher’s primary goal is to help students modify their initial emotional reactions to their often idiosyncratic readings – not by rubber-stamping any student’s subjective reading as correct – but by continually pushing students to make more mature, more justified readings of the text until they get closer to a more plausible reading, and in the process helping them “get their mental house in order” by clarifying their values and thinking. Literature, she writes, in providing emotionally moving, provocative stories, can move us – or our students – to varied emotions, and, through social exchange in dialogues and discussions with others in the classroom, we can be shown alternative responses to literary situations, and thereby can be helped toward understanding both our own biases, emphases (91) and habitual ways of responding to people, conflicts, or moral dilemmas – what Rosenblatt calls our “fixed readings” (93). And via this social interchange with other peers, and via our ability to verbalize our thoughts about characters and human situations that often mirror our own lives, we are able to work our way toward more mature, more “rational” (in Rosenblatt’s words) responses to emotional situations.
Values of Reading
All of this comprises tremendous value for individual students and the seventh chapter of the book describes many of these – increased self-knowledge about our own values, beliefs, and ways of responding to the world, greater exposure to and empathy toward people who are different than we are (and literature allows us to encounter more human characters than we might otherwise in real life), and even some explicitly political values, such as the ability to view life (and thereby, says Rosenblatt, public policy proposals) in more human terms. Literature, she writes, humanizes the world, while the reading of textbooks does not. She writes of the human tendency to keep others’ problems and feelings at bay: “This callous shell is there to be dealt with” (177) and of literature as a kind of “diffusion of humane sentiment” (178).
But it is her notion that literature offers us vicarious practice at dealing with the tricky human situations that is perhaps her most fascinating insight. Rosenblatt writes that literature, by showing us characters faced with difficult decisions, allows us a kind of vicarious practice, a sort of “trying-it-out” in the safety of fiction, of a variety of moral approaches, ethical decision-making, and ways of being in the world. This practice will only help us in the long run, as we assimilate new ideas for our own personal conduct and augment our existing modes of behavior. She writes that literature and literary discussion with others leads students to realize that they must “put their mental houses in order” (114) – to consider their own biases, values, and ways of responding and to enlarge them, clarify them, modify them.
The Process of Responding to Literature
And even more than the benefits of these newfound values that students may takeaway with them is this valuable process of inquiry into greater self-knowledge, more appropriate moral and ethical frameworks, and more judicious, humane, and effective ways of responding to new or challenging situations that Rosenblatt wants students to take away with them. It reminded me of the way that Don Murray aimed to teach writing students not so much what good essays look like, as to teach them how to self-monitor so that they would know how to make their own writing better.
Rosenblatt wants to teach students – via literature study – a process for how to better appraise and respond to new situations in personal life, in civic life, or in political life. Befitting her Pragmatist philosophy, the method she recommends is essentially the scientific method: “An understanding of the sprint of scientific method and its application to human affairs is the most fundamental social concept that the teacher of literature should possess” (128). She writes that science implies “the spirit of scrupulous inquiry and the flexible approach,” which she feels is very fruitful as a method of approaching literature and for living life: it is skeptical toward received wisdom, allergic to dogma, appreciates complexity, requires evidence, puts for hypotheses, and recognizes a tentative, contingent notion of truth. Rosenblatt has some very astute, very moving passages in quite poetic language about all of this, and more than once while reading her book I found myself thinking about what a great experience a future rereading of her book will be. Again, she echoes Dewey a great deal: society is changing so fast that students must be equipped by schools to “attain [their] own intellectual and emotional base” (163). In order to teach students to respond to complex situations and challenges more rationally, she writes grandly, we must effect “the transmutation of scientific knowledge and critical opinion into emotional attitudes guiding behavior” (171). This will not only “enable students to handle better their own observations and experiences” but will help “the present knowledge concerning humankind and society will bear fruit in more rational social development and in happier, more complete human beings” (171).
To do this, teachers must continually press students. The teacher will not “impose a dogmatic framework on the concept of human nature; he will not allow conventional assumptions to go unchallenged; he will not permit his students to fall back on pat, stereotyped formulas” (136). Instead, the literature teacher will “awaken his students to . . . the complexity of human behavior and society . . . will share . . . the belief that knowledge concerning human nature must be the result of careful, controlled observation, that any hypothesis must be tested and retested” (136). In effect this sounds like literature instructors teaching students to apply the scientific method to all of the uniquely human moments that they face – meeting new people, handling interpersonal conflict, evaluating political leaders, reasoning through everyday challenges – through vicarious practice encountering these problems in realistic literature.
Once again, in Rosenblatt’s system, there are correct interpretations of literature, or at least more correct interpretations – just as there are more correct understandings of human nature. While Rosenblatt opposes the New Critics’ insistence on a single correct reading, she clearly rejects rampant subjectivism. Her care to allow students the freedom to react individually and emotionally is not an end but a beginning – a Pragmatist’s starting point, an entry (she might say, the only entry possible) into accessing individual students’ opinions and beliefs. Meanwhile, the literature teacher, as the Critical Theorists might say, is not neutral; for Rosenblatt, the teacher insists on the scientific method as a means for pushing students ever deeper toward truth.
Even more, Rosenblatt insists that teachers must have worked out their own understandings about the important values and understandings they wish students to attain through literature study. She names a number of these in a chapter called “Some Basic Social Concepts” – the idea that circumstances, not voluntary choice alone, may determine a person’s outcomes; the importance of culture in determining social standards and beliefs; and a variety of other insights generated by social scientists. Still, even if teachers have definite goals for students to understand, they must avoid indoctrination or dogmatism, a point that for Rosenblatt is both substantial and methodological. As with Dewey, she believes that value systems and problem solving approaches become obsolete with changing conditions, and she also believes that for learning to really stick, students must experience it, rather than merely hear it. They must come to their own conclusions rather than be told conclusions.
My Reservations
But the biggest reservation I had while reading Rosenblatt was that her specific goal of teaching students to improve their ability to respond to “life” situations seemed both easy to accept and hard to accept.
It’s easy to accept the very practical, political notion that we must teach students to be skeptical citizens, voters, and consumers – astute and critical readers capable of parsing a would-be authoritarian’s rhetoric, seeing through a demagogue’s act, quickly sizing up a company’s dubious claims. But I found it harder to accept this approach when it seemed less tied to a practical concern for students (like their future civic duties) and more focused on simply being better at responding – for lack of a better term – to life. A sardonic comment I’d once read in a book kept coming to my head: “You’re an English major, huh? What’s that going to do – help you look at life with a more mature perspective?” What are we aiming for – helping students manage their interpersonal conflicts with more maturity? We are teachers, as Rosenblatt takes pains herself to point out, not psychologists. But Rosenblatt, in my view, does not help her case; too often what she really seems to be aiming for with students is either couched in obscure language (“a growth in human understanding” [32], the “solution of personal problems” or a capacity for “constructive social action” [128-129]), or phrased as merely a greater appreciation for what she terms “literary experience.” Very often, especially early in the book, the focus seems on teaching students to appreciate art-for-art’s sake. This is an important goal, but not an urgent one for high school teachers. Too often Rosenblatt’s focus seemed to drift toward the “soft skills” of life-adjustment.
I had to keep reminding myself that self-knowledge, emotional awareness, the ability to reflect before acting in response to life’s challenges are all worthy goals of an education. It was a constant act of translation for me while reading to connect Rosenblatt’s sometimes vague or apparently non-practical concerns with many of the larger and more important themes she writes about as well. Understanding across difference is impossible if we do not learn to regulate our own emotional reactions, as Rosenblatt reminds us. We cannot listen if we do not learn to refrain from judgment, to reflect on our own biases, to keep an open mind – all valuable skills that can be practiced well in the English Language Arts classroom.
Practical Methods
Rosenblatt recommends that ELA teachers choose novels that speak to student concerns. Even though students respond in sometimes highly-individualized ways, there are clearly common elements within any grouping of students that are well spoken to by certain works of literature. When teaching adolescents, this often seems to mean reaching for coming of age stories – those which focus on the going concerns of teenagers trying to figure out how to make sense of their changing world. Then teachers must allow students freedom in responding to literature in individual, sometimes emotional ways. Students are not to read books just to identify the single “correct” meaning; they must have freedom to respond organically and honestly.
Meanwhile, students must also have opportunities to discuss literature with other students – not only to practice their skills of oral expression (debate and discussion being valuable tools for almost anything in our society), but for the purpose of being brought to a more mature, more refined response to the challenges and promptings of life, as well as for the purpose of collective meaning-making: the drive to get at the truth (or at least provisional truth) of a novel or text through hypothesis, varied perspectives, and even argumentation. This also aids the very important goal of values clarification (though Rosenblatt does not call it that): pushing students to update their belief systems based on newly acquired information and based on hearing peers’ perspectives. Finally, this teaches students to approach life in the spirit of scientific inquiry, imparting a process for open-minded reflection whenever one encounters a new challenge. The job of the teacher is not to validate the substance of each response, but to create the conditions for honest, frank discussion, as well as to continually press students to support their answers with reference to the text, as well as to provide an environment for fruitful collective meaning-making via discussion and debate.
One thing that is interesting is that Rosenblatt does not particularly mention the value of efferent reading in this book. Her focus, perhaps, is on reacting against the overly-strict emphasis on such a focus, on regaining students’ capacity to read aesthetically, to experience (not just “understand”) literature. But efferent reading is clearly important too – perhaps even more important, practically speaking, for future citizens or workers. It strikes me that the goals of efferent reading – comprehension, summary, a quick understanding of purpose, meaning, and relevant details – need to be prioritized right alongside the more social and political goals of aesthetic reading. Students must get sharper at picking things up quickly, at using strategies to make sense of increasingly hard texts, at being in the habit of reading actively rather than passively. These goals are not necessarily opposed to but exist in cooperation with the broader goals that Rosenblatt outlines.
Takeaways
This book is a classic. As with The Scarlet Letter, I’m sure that future me will reread Literature as Exploration in a few years and get even more out of it. It’s that kind of book. Almost no part felt dated, and the prose – light and fresh and often surprising – was a joy to read. The content was incredibly rich, well-organized, and well supported by examples. It wasn’t preachy and Rosenblatt always seems as though she’s writing from a place of being “in touch” with real students – what they think and feel and how they really act. This book has such an organic, overall, humanistic purpose to it – something distinctly lacking in so many other books about reading that are either inch-deep methodological menus (strategies! more strategies!) or impenetrable books that seem to spend most of the duration quibbling about micro-semantic questions of language acquisition.
Even more than her fresh and original theory of reader response, it is Rosenblatt’s notion of the goals of this approach that will stay with me: the shaping up of one’s moral framework, the development of understanding of self and others, the notion of the process takeaways – responding to literature with a balance of honest emotion and sober reasoning. I am fascinated, in general, by the notion that reading is an inherently moral pursuit because it shapes our moral beliefs. The power of story to help us understand the world is considerable, and is attested to, in a strange way, by the attempts on the part of some non-educators to control, restrict, or influence the books in school curricula. The question for educators choosing books to read with students is a challenging and inherently political one: whose stories are worth hearing? Which authors and characters are important to try to understand? And how to balance these moral goals with the other goals for reading – the basic need for a book to be engrossing and engaging for students, the need for a “just-right” level of text complexity? The selection of texts is an endlessly thorny question for educators. Whatever the answer is, selection needs to be guided by clear goals – and in developing those, Literature as Exploration is one of the best places to start.