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When Louise Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration appeared in 1938, it drew attention from many quarters. For instance, in the June 29, 1938 issue of The New Republic in the column "A Reader's List," the magazine's reviewer offered this commentary: "A really important book, in spite of its insipid title. Writing chiefly for teachers of high-school and college English, the author has managed to show the relevance of social science to the esthetic experience, and vice versa, in a way as yet unequaled by some of our best Marxists" (231).
For those who read Literature as Exploration today-now in its fifth edition, published by MLA in 1995-it is still "a really important book." As one anonymous reviewer at Amazon.Com succinctly puts it, "If you teach literature (at any level) and haven't read this book, you probably don't know what you are doing." Wayne Booth in his Foreword to the fifth edition amplifies this reviewer's remark: "Has she been influential? Immensely so: how many other critical works first published in the late thirties have extended themselves, like this one, to five editions, proving themselves relevant to decade after decade of critical and pedagogical revolution? . . . She has in fact been attended to by thousands of teachers and students in each generation. She has probably influenced more teachers in their ways of dealing with literature than any other critic" (vii).
In Literature as Exploration, Rosenblatt reminds us that the reader plays a vital role in the life of any piece of literature: "There is no such thing as a generic reader or a generic literary work; there are only the potential millions of individual readers or the potential millions of individual literary works. A novel or a poem or a play remains merely inkspots on paper until a reader transforms them into a set of meaningful symbols" (1995, 24).
A half century later in 1978, Rosenblatt published The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transnational Theory of the Literary Work. In this equally important book, Rosenblatt clearly demonstrates that "no one else, no matter how much more competent, more informed, nearer the ideal (whatever that might be), can read (perform) the poem or the story for us" (141). Further, Rosenblatt notes, "the poem, then, must be...