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[EDITORS' NOTE: One does not think of Louise Rosenblatt without also considering her two seminal texts: Literature as Exploration (New York: MLA, 1938) and The Reader, the Text, the Poem (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).1 In Literature as Exploration, Rosenblatt first presented her transactional theory of reading as she explored the personal, social, and cultural contexts of reading. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem, she elaborated on that theory, focusing on aesthetic and efferent reading. We offer for you here a mere sample of both texts-enough, we hope, to send you back to these classics or introduce you to them for the first time.]
Literature as Exploration
In a turbulent age, our schools and colleges must prepare the student to meet unprecedented and unpredictable problems. He needs to understand himself, he needs to work out harmonious relationships with other people. He must achieve a philosophy, an inner center from which to view in perspective the shifting society about him; he will influence for good or ill its future development. Any knowledge about humankind and society that schools can give him should be assimilated into the stream of his actual life.
It is not only for some future way of life that he needs to be prepared. During his school years, he is already part of the larger world, meeting the impact of its domestic and international tensions, adjusting to adults who bear the marks of its successes and failures, discovering the possibilities it holds open to him. As he plays his youthful role, he is creating the personality and ideals that will shape his role as an adult. Young people everywhere are asking, "What do the things that we are offered in school and college mean for the life that we are now living or are going to live?"
Teachers of literature have been too modest about their possible contribution to these demands. Their task, they have felt, is to make their students more sensitive to the art of words, to induct them into our literary heritage. Leaving to others more mundane preoccupations, they had enough to do, it seemed, in busying themselves with purely literary matters.
The demand that the teaching of literature have some relation to the pupil's immediate human...