Louise Rosenblatt
Encyclopedia
Louise Michelle Rosenblatt (23 August 1904 in Atlantic City, New Jersey
- 08 February 2005 in Arlington, Virginia) was an American
university professor. She is best-known as a researcher into the teaching of literature.
, the women's college at Columbia University
in New York City, receiving a Bachelor of Arts
degree in 1925. Her roommate was Margaret Mead
, the anthropologist, who urged her to study anthropology
. She initially planned to travel to Samoa
after graduation in order to do field research, but decided instead to continue her studies in France
. In Paris, she met French author André Gide
and American expatriates Gertrude Stein
and Robert Penn Warren
.
Rosenblatt obtained a Certitude d'etudes Françaises from the University of Grenoble
in 1926. She continued her studies in Paris, receiving a PhD
in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne
in 1931.
Rosenblatt published her first book in 1931. It was written in French
and examined the "art for art's sake" movement that had stirred England
in the latter portion of the nineteenth century.
Rosenblatt was enrolled as an instructor at Barnard College in 1927, and remained on the college's rolls through 1938. In 1938 she transferred to Brooklyn College
, and remained on that college's rolls through 1948. In 1948 she became a Professor of English Education at New York University's School of Education, where she remained until her retirement in 1972. She retired to Princeton, New Jersey
. In 2002 she moved to Arlington, Virginia, to live with a son. She died of congestive heart failure at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington on 08 February 2005.
During World War II
Rosenblatt worked for the United States Office of War Information
, analyzing reports concerning or coming from France, which at that time was controlled by the Germans.
, who was in the philosophy department at Columbia in the 1930s, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James
.
She is best known for her influential texts Literature as Exploration (1938) and "The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work" (1978), in which she argues that the act of reading literature involves a transaction between the reader and the text. Each "transaction" is a unique experience in which the reader and text continuously act and are acted upon by each other. A written work (often referred to as a "poem" in her writing) does not have the same meaning for everyone, as each reader brings individual background knowledge, beliefs, and context into the reading act. Additionally, she distinguished between different kinds of reading with her defined "stances". Rosenblatt placed all reading transactions on a continuum between "aesthetic" -or reading for pleasure, experiencing the poem-and "efferent" -or reading to gain meaning. Rosenblatt maintained that the act of reading was a dynamic '"transaction" between the reader and the text. She argued that the meaning of any text lay not in the work itself but in the reader's interaction with it, whether it was a play by Shakespeare
or a novel by Toni Morrison
. Her work made her a well-known reader-response theorist.
In 1992 Rosenblatt was inducted into the International Reading Association
's Reading Hall of Fame.
She received the John Dewey Society Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
Rosenblatt made her final public appearance in Indianapolis
in November 2004 at age 100, speaking to a standing-room-only session of a convention of English teachers.
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Atlantic City is a city in Atlantic County, New Jersey, United States, and a nationally renowned resort city for gambling, shopping and fine dining. The city also served as the inspiration for the American version of the board game Monopoly. Atlantic City is located on Absecon Island on the coast...
- 08 February 2005 in Arlington, Virginia) was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
university professor. She is best-known as a researcher into the teaching of literature.
Biography
Rosenblatt was born in Atlantic City to Jewish immigrant parents. She attended Barnard CollegeBarnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
, the women's college at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in New York City, receiving a Bachelor of Arts
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
degree in 1925. Her roommate was Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
, the anthropologist, who urged her to study anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
. She initially planned to travel to Samoa
Samoa
Samoa , officially the Independent State of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa is a country encompassing the western part of the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. It became independent from New Zealand in 1962. The two main islands of Samoa are Upolu and one of the biggest islands in...
after graduation in order to do field research, but decided instead to continue her studies in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. In Paris, she met French author André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
and American expatriates Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
and Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
.
Rosenblatt obtained a Certitude d'etudes Françaises from the University of Grenoble
University of Grenoble
University of Grenoble or Grenoble University was a university in Grenoble, France until 1970, when it was split into several different institutions:...
in 1926. She continued her studies in Paris, receiving a PhD
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
in 1931.
Rosenblatt published her first book in 1931. It was written in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and examined the "art for art's sake" movement that had stirred England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in the latter portion of the nineteenth century.
Rosenblatt was enrolled as an instructor at Barnard College in 1927, and remained on the college's rolls through 1938. In 1938 she transferred to Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
, and remained on that college's rolls through 1948. In 1948 she became a Professor of English Education at New York University's School of Education, where she remained until her retirement in 1972. She retired to Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton is a community located in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It is best known as the location of Princeton University, which has been sited in the community since 1756...
. In 2002 she moved to Arlington, Virginia, to live with a son. She died of congestive heart failure at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington on 08 February 2005.
During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
Rosenblatt worked for the United States Office of War Information
United States Office of War Information
The United States Office of War Information was a U.S. government agency created during World War II to consolidate government information services. It operated from June 1942 until September 1945...
, analyzing reports concerning or coming from France, which at that time was controlled by the Germans.
Research and contributions
When Rosenblatt began teaching English Literature at Barnard, she developed an intense interest in each reader's unique response to a given text. Her views regarding literacy were influenced by John DeweyJohn Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, who was in the philosophy department at Columbia in the 1930s, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
.
She is best known for her influential texts Literature as Exploration (1938) and "The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work" (1978), in which she argues that the act of reading literature involves a transaction between the reader and the text. Each "transaction" is a unique experience in which the reader and text continuously act and are acted upon by each other. A written work (often referred to as a "poem" in her writing) does not have the same meaning for everyone, as each reader brings individual background knowledge, beliefs, and context into the reading act. Additionally, she distinguished between different kinds of reading with her defined "stances". Rosenblatt placed all reading transactions on a continuum between "aesthetic" -or reading for pleasure, experiencing the poem-and "efferent" -or reading to gain meaning. Rosenblatt maintained that the act of reading was a dynamic '"transaction" between the reader and the text. She argued that the meaning of any text lay not in the work itself but in the reader's interaction with it, whether it was a play by Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
or a novel by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...
. Her work made her a well-known reader-response theorist.
Works
- Literature as Exploration (1938). Literature as Exploration. New York: Appleton-Century; (1968). New York: Noble and Noble; (1976). New York: Noble and Noble; (1983). New York: Modern Language Association; (1995). New York: Modern Language Association
- "Toward a cultural approach to literature", in College EnglishCollege EnglishCollege English is an official publication of the American National Council of Teachers of English and is aimed at college-level teachers and scholars of English...
, 7, 459-466. (1946) - "The enriching values of reading". In W. Gray (Ed.), Reading in an age of mass communication (pp. 19-38). Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries. (1949)
- "The acid test in the teaching of literature". English Journal, 45, 66-74. (1956)
- Research development seminar in the teaching of English. New York: New York University Press. (1963)
- "The poem as event" in College English, 26, 123-8. (1964)
- "A way of happening", in Educational Record, 49, 339-346. (1968)
- "Towards a transactional theory of reading", in Journal of Reading Behavior, 1(1), 31-51. (1969)
- "Literature and the invisible reader", in The Promise of English: NCTE 1970 distinguished lectures. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. (1970)
- The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press (1978). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press (reprint 1994)
- "What facts does this poem teach you?", in Language Arts, 57, 386-94. (1980)
- "The transactional theory of the literary work: Implications for research", in Charles Cooper. (Ed.), Researching response to literature and the teaching of literature. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. (1985)
- "Viewpoints: Transaction versus interaction — a terminological rescue operation", in Research in the Teaching of English, 19, 96-107. (1985)
- "The aesthetic transaction", in Journal of Aesthetic Education, 20 (4), 122-128. (1986)
- "Literary Theory", in J. Flood, J. Jensen, D. Lapp, & J. Squire (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (pp. 57-62). New York: Macmillan. (1991)
- Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays (2005)
Awards and recognitions
When she retired in 1972, Rosenblatt received New York University's Great Teacher award.In 1992 Rosenblatt was inducted into the International Reading Association
International Reading Association
The International Reading Association is an international professional organization that was created in 1956 to improve reading instruction, facilitate dialogue about research on reading, and encourage the habit of reading....
's Reading Hall of Fame.
She received the John Dewey Society Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
Rosenblatt made her final public appearance in Indianapolis
Indianapolis
Indianapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Indiana, and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population is 839,489. It is by far Indiana's largest city and, as of the 2010 U.S...
in November 2004 at age 100, speaking to a standing-room-only session of a convention of English teachers.
External links
- 1999 award citation
- 1997 article The Significance of Louise Rosenblatt on the Field of Teaching Literature
- http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Rosenblatt/1999 Interview with Louise Rosenblatt by University of MiamiUniversity of MiamiThe University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...
students]