Louise Rosenblatt

Louise Michelle Rosenblatt (23 August 1904 in Atlantic City, New Jersey – 8 February 2005 in Arlington, Virginia) was an American university professor.

She is best known as a researcher into the teaching of literature.

Rosenblatt was born in Atlantic City to Jewish immigrant parents.

She attended Barnard College, 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.

A year behind Mead at Barnard, Rosenblatt took over her position as editor-in-chief of the Barnard Bulletin.

While Rosenblatt initially planned to travel to Samoa after graduation in order to do field research, she 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'études françaises from the University of Grenoble in 1926.

She was a strong supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), her socialist instincts led her to support Norman Thomas, before moving to FDR in the 1930s, and later in the 1990s and 2000s, she wrote her representatives often to effect policy changes, especially in relation to the No Child Left Behind Act.

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 Dewey, who was in the philosophy department at Columbia in the 1930s, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.

She continued her studies in Paris, receiving a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne in 1931.

That same year she married Sidney Ratner, a professor at Rutgers University.

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 1931, 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.

She is best known for her two influential texts: Literature as Exploration (1938) was originally completed for the Commission on Human Relations and was a publication of the Progressive Education Association (it subsequently went through 5 editions); 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 (Dewey's term) 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 transaction 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 her view, 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.

Rosenblatt's idea of the reading process, however, does not lead to all readings being equally accurate.

For the reader's part, he or she must pay close attention to every detail of the text and pay equal attention to his or her own responses.

This process exemplifies not only reader-response criticism but also close reading.

This inclusion of Rosenblatt's "transactional" theory within the designation "reader-response," however, needs to be contested.

Rosenblatt herself contended that she was never propounding a view of reading centered on isolated, individual readers as was the case with "reception theory."

Instead, the focus of her thinking throughout her long career was on how individuals came to negotiate their readings in social terms.

Such an ongoing conversation between reader(s) and text(s) was her way of emphasizing the importance of literature for human development in democratic settings.

As part of her "transactional" theory, Rosenblatt distinguished between two kinds of reading, or "stances," which she viewed on a continuum between "efferent" and "aesthetic."

Anchoring one end is Efferent reading, the most common kind, in which the reader seeks to derive information from the text.

In this instance, a reader is concerned mainly or totally with the gist, the message, the information, he or she can "carry away," which is what "efferent" means, conducting away.

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.

Subsequently, she held visiting professorships at Rutgers and the University of Miami, along with a number of other short term appointments, although she maintained residence at her long-term home in Princeton, New Jersey.

In 2002 she moved to Arlington, Virginia, to live with her son Jonathan.

She died of congestive heart failure at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington on 8 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.

Throughout her life, Rosenblatt was consistently involved in political activism.

Carrying on a tradition from her family championing the "underdog," her editorials in the Barnard Bulletin spoke to her concern for building democratic institutions.