Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays

by Louise M. Rosenblatt

No one has contributed more to our understanding of the relationship between readers and texts than Louise Rosenblatt. Her classic Literature as Exploration now in its fifth editionintroduced the transactional theory of reading and pioneered a revolution that continues today in classrooms where reading and literature are taught. She maintains that both the reader and the text are essential to the making of meaning. The reader is active, drawing on a reservoir of past experience to interpret the marks on the page. The implications of Rosenblatt's theory range from ideas about instruction methods to ruminations on authority in the classroom, on the page, and in our everyday reading lives. Making Meaning with Texts brings together some of Rosenblatt's most important work, essays from the 1930s through the 1990s that explore the breadth and depth of her theory. She speaks directly to you, the teacher. In three partsTheory; Education; and Criticismshe gives body to her ideas. The transactional approach expressed in 1938 has been widely adopted and remains vitally important to you today. This is a professional resource that you will return to again and again.

Genres: Nonfiction, Teaching

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2005

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rosenblatt is something like the grand old woman of literature education: she started publishing before the first World War, and kept going strong into the early 2000s. This book is sort of a hodgepodge of her various articles and the like. They are well done, but in a collection like this they become repetitive to the point of being redundant. Rosenblatt is the main proponent of what she calls the "transactional theory" of reading (as distinct from "reader response theory"): its main ideas are these.
1. Meaning happens at the intersection of one particular reader reading one particular text (thus there are differing, though entirely reasonable, interpretations of a single text).
2. Every reading act happens on a continuum between the aesthetic and "efferent" (a neologism meaning "information-centered": comes from the Latin for "to carry away" as she points out at every opportunity) and it is the reader's (and not the text's) job to determine where he or she falls on that continuum.
3. Literature instruction ought to point students toward the aesthetic pole. That is, it is the job of the teacher to help students learn to love literature for its own sake.
Despite some ambivalences, I feel inclined to say of Rosenblatt, as WC Williams did of Emily Dickinson, that "she was a real good guy."

[Sirpa Grierson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was asked by English Journal to review this book just after Rosenblatt's death in 2005. She was the founder of transactional (reader response) theory in 1938 and author of classics including Literature as Exploration (1938) and "The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1994)." This final volume came out just after her 100th birthday. I was thrilled as I had heard her speak at NCTE the year before. She was still so quick-witted and charming at that time.

My review is in the English Journal:
Grierson, S. (2006). “Applying Louise Rosenblatt’s Theories to Practice” [Review of Making Meaning With Texts: Selected Essays by Louise Rosenblatt].

[Khoai Tây]

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[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reading this for the second time with a new lens. Pretty profound.