Assessing the influence of dewey's epistemology on rosenblatt's reader response theory

Educational Theory

Volumn 46, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 395-413

  Connell, Jeanne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65249096287     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1996.00395.x     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. Jane Tompkins ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1980)
2. Deanne Bogdan and Stanley Straw, Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1990)
3. Edmund Farreli and James Squire, eds., Transactions with Literature: A Fifty Year Perspective (Urbana: National Council for Teachers of English, 1990);
4. John Clifford, ed., The Experience of Reading: Louise Rosenblatt and Reader-Response Theory (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991)
5. John Willinsky, The Triumph of Literature/The Fate of Literacy: English in the Secondary School Curriculum (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).
6. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (1938; reprint, New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983)
7. Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: A Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
8. This book will be referred to as RTP with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations.
9. James, and Dewey see Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem; Louise Rosenblatt, "The Aesthetic Transaction", Journal of Aesthetic Education 20, no. 4 (1986), 122-23
10. Louise Rosenblatt, "The Transactional Theory: Against Dualisms", College English 55, no. 4 (1993), 381-82.
11. Of course, at an even more general level the reader and the text are co-constructed and come out of the transactional process rather than being taken as given. I thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting the co-construction of subject and object in the writings of Dewey, and I have applied this concept to the works of Rosenblatt.
12. Louise Rosenblatt, "Literary Theory" in fames Flood.
13. Julie M. Jensen, Diane Lapp, and James Squire, eds., Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 59.
14. John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, Knowing and the Known (1949; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1960).
15. Rosenblatt's formulation of a "transactional" theory of reading solidified after she read Dewey and Bentley's account of transaction in Knowing and the Known (One of Rosenblatt's first systematic uses of the term transaction occurs in her article "Toward a Transactional Theory of Reading""Journal of Reading Behavior" 1, no. 1 (1969): 31-49.
16. This article was then followed by her major theoretical work The Reader, the Text, the Poem: A Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. In his correspondence to Dewey in 1950, Bentley writes that "Sidney Ratner wrote a little while back [that]. . Louise Rosenblatt, his wife [professor] at New York University ([and teacher] of literary criticism), was all excited about application of Knowing and the Known to literature." (Sidney Ratner and Jules Altman, eds.
17. John Dewey and Arthur R. Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence 1932-1951 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964), 630.
18. Raymond Boisvert, Dewey's Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), 23.
19. John Dewey, Education and Experience (1938; reprint, New York: MacMilian, 1963), 25.
20. Rosenblatt, "Literary Theory", 61.
21. Alan Purves and Richard Beach, Literature and the Reader: Research on Response to Literature, Reading Interests, and the Teaching of Literature (Urbana: NCTE, 1972)
22. Richard Beach and James Marshall, Teaching Literature in the Secondary School (San Diego: Harcourt, 1990).
23. Louise Rosenblatt, "Retrospective," in Transactions with Literature, ed.
24. Edmund Farreli and James Squire (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990), 100.
25. Willinsky, The Triumph of Literature, chaps. 1 and 5.
26. James Squire, "The Ten Great Ideas in the Teaching of English in the Past Half Century" in Teacher as Learner, ed.
27. Merron Chorny (Calgary, Alberta: Language in the Classroom Project, 1985), 9-18.
28. Rosenblatt mentions Petr Kropotkin, see Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizon Books, 1902).
29. Rosenblatt, "Retrospective", 97. For discussion of Emerson's influence on pragmatic philosophy see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
30. As a participant in an experimental honors program at Barnard College (1921-1925) she read widely in English and American literature as well as in the new social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Rosenblatt began her academic career in 1929 as an instructor and then professor of English at Barnard College. She worked at Brooklyn College for ten years beginning in 1938, and then spent twenty-four years as a professor of English education at New York University.
31. There is also a connection to Dewey's works through Rosenblatt's husband, Sidney Ratner. Ratner, known primarily as an economic historian and secondarily for his work in political science, co-authored the 1950 Dial article "John Dewey, Philosopher of Science and Freedom," edited.
32. John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence, and recently published two articles on Dewey's influence in math education
33. "John Dewey's Empiricism, and Experimcntalism in the Recent Philosophy of Mathematics," Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (1992): 476-81.
34. "John Dewey, E.H. Moore, and Philosophy of Mathematics Education in the Twentieth Century," Journal of Mathematical Behavior 11, (1992): 105-16.
35. Personal correspondence from Rosenblatt, 12 April 1993.
36. Rosenblatt, "Retrospective," 101, reports that following her involvement with the Commission on Human Relations, she became involved in the two major national organizations concerned with the teaching of literature, Modern Language Association (MLA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). NCTE became the primary organization to which she devoted her energies over the next half-century. As a professor of teachers of English, her contact with graduate students for more than two decades, and her active membership in NCTE, each provided Rosenblatt with an audience for her ideas.
37. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration.
38. Willinsky, The Triumph of Literature, 120.
39. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, vii.
40. Cieanth Brooks and Penn Warren, eds., Understanding Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938)
41. Rene Welleck and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949)
42. W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy," in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1946; reprint, Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1954)
43. E.D. Hirsch, The Validity of Interpretation (1967; reprint, New London: Yale University Press, 1973).
44. The idea of literature as art was not a typical concern among nineteenth century literary theorists, who focused on literary history, author's biography, contemporary social history, and the inspirational or ethical "message" of the text.
45. Rosenblatt, "Retrospective", 102.
46. The most influential nineteenth and twentieth century literary theorists were Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis, and Northrup Frye. These theorists turn their attention to the text as the source of meaning, albeit in very different ways. Alan Purves characterizes the primary aim of these text-based theorists as follows: "Arnold espouses an approach to literature that leads to the disinterested critic who judges ail by the 'classical ideal'; Leavis wants students to learn the great tradition of moral literature and the use of literature in society, and Frye has readers learn the great myths and structural themes that make literature what it is."Alan Purves, "Toward a Reevaluation of Reader Response and School Literature", Language Arts 70 (1993): 355.
47. Willinsky, The Triumph of Literature, 138.
48. Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism, Bogdan and Straw, Beyond Communication; Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)
49. Judith Fetterly, The Resistant Render: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978)
50. Mark Faust, "Ways of Reading and the Use of Force" (English Journal 81(1992): 44-49.
51. Annette Kolodny, "A Map for Rereading: Or Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts," New Literary History 11, no. 3 (1980): 451-67.
52. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
53. Rosenblatt, "Literary Theory,"; 59.
54. Flower and Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America: Volume 2 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1977), 830.
55. Philosopher Richard Bernstein characterizes the significance of Dewey's use of the term transaction as providing "a more rigorous formulation of the category of the organic." Richard Bernstein, ed., "Introduction," On Experience, Nature, and Freedom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merriil, 1960), x.
56. Dewey argues that the stimulus/response are imported in the late nineteenth century from physiology to psychology and philosophy fails its intended purpose to provide a more iinificd and dynainic account of hchavior than was possible under associationism and theories influcnccd by a mind/body dualism. Instead, Deweypointsout that by partioning experience into a separate stimulus and response, the reflexare model preserves the sanic hard distinctions it had been designed to replace, and provides no understanding of thought-guided action, planning behavior, and learning; Flower and Murphey, A History of Philoshophpy in America, 829-30.
57. Dewey and Bentley, Knowing and the Known, 276, 103-4.
58. Rosenblatt "Literary Theory" 60.
59. For recent critical assessment of Dewey's spectator theory of knowledge, sec Christopher Kulp, The End of Epistemology: Dewey and His Allies on the Spectator Theory of Knowledge (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992).
60. John Dewey, Quest for Certaint y: A Study uf the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1929), 219.
61. John Dewey, 1922, "Human Nature and Conduct," in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (1922; reprint, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 176-77.
62. John Dewey, Experience and Nature [1925]; reprint, LaSallé, III.: Open Court Publishing, 1985). 2
63. John Dewey, "On the Need for Recovery of Philosophy" in John Dewey, On Experience, Nature, and Freedom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1960), 26.
64. Dewey, "On the Need for Recovery of Philosophy," 23.
65. Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan Company, 1916), 139.
66. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 21.
67. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 2 and Dewey, "On the Need for Recovery of Philosophy," 26.
68. For a recent discussion of the constructed nature of Dewey's epistcmology, see Jim Garrison, "Realism, Deweyan Pragmatism, and Educational Research" Educational Researcher 23, no. 1 (1994): 11.
69. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 29.
70. John Dewey, Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1929), 178.
71. Dewey and Bentley, Knowing and the Known, 68.
72. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 140.
73. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 130.
74. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), 176.
75. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 130.
76. Sleeper finds the concept of transaction so central to Dewey's metaphysics that he calls Dewey's pragmatism a "radical form of realism - a transactional realism." Ralph Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 3.
77. Lisa Heldke, "John Dewey and Evelyn Fox Keller: A Shared Epistemological Tradition," Hypatia 2, no. 3(1987): 136-37.
78. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 149. For further discussion of Dewey's behavioral semantics.
79. Garrison, "Realism, Deweyan Pragmatism, and Educational Research," and Heldke, "John Dewey and Evelyn Fox Keller."
80. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 144. This quote was brought to my attention by Garrison, "Realism, Deweyan Pragmatism, and Educational Research."
81. Ibid., 138. The idea of correspondence is developed extensively by Heldke.
82. As Kaplan correctly suggests, Dewey's description of value and the use of intelligence are localized in individuals,- both ends and means of social action can be defined only by reference to individuals. Thus, Dewey ultimately gives more weight to individual interests than to class, state, nation, or an abstract humanity. Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry (Sun Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1964), 43.
83. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 348.
84. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 295.
85. Alfonso Damico, Individuality and Community: The Social and Political Thought of John Dewey (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978), 57-61.
86. Heldke, "John Dewey and Evelyn Fox Keller," 140
87. Boisvert, Dewey's Metaphysics, 180.
88. Dewey, Education and Experience, 43-44Dewey, Democracy and Education, 144.
89. Rosenblatt, "The Transactional Theory," 385.
90. Rosenblatt, "Retrospective," 106.
91. Rosenblatt, "The Transactional Theory" 385.
92. Louise Rosenblatt, "The Poem as Event" College English, 26 (1964): 2, 125.
93. Rosenblatt, "The Transactional Theory," 382.
94. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 205.
95. Rosenblatt, "Retrospective," 100.
96. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, chap. 2.