Reviews for Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays

The average rating for Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-21 00:00:00 Reshan Pallie 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."

Review # 2 was written on 2008-03-23 00:00:00 Jewelrit Stewart 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].