The poem as event

Thank you so much for your participation and the interesting discussion that we had on Wednesday. I am very happy to complete this task, and just after that I realized how it is to lead a discussion :) Good luck to Meagan and Tara next week!

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25 November 2009

Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The Poem as Event.” The Reader, the Text, the Poem: the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. 6-21. Print.

In Chapter Two of her book, “The Poem as Event,” Rosenblatt describes the reading process and identifies its components, their functions and meaning. After examining the process of readers’ interpretation of the poem “It Bids Pretty Fair” by Robert Frost, she arrives at the following conclusions:

Ø The readers were active and dynamic;

Ø They paid attention to the images, feelings, attitudes, associations, and ideas that the words and their referents evoked;

Ø The readers referred to their past experiences evoking images, feelings, ideas that created the particular world of the reader built into the literary process;

Ø The interpretation of a poem is a critical and self-corrective process;

Ø The text of the poem fulfils two functions: stimulating (it activates the concepts that are connected with verbal symbols) and regulating (it helps the readers to select what to keep their attention on while interpreting the text).

To eliminate the confusion in critical theory Rosenblatt differentiates the terms “text” and “poem” stating that:

Ø “Text is a set or series of signs interpretable as linguistic symbols” (12).

Ø “Poem is the whole category of aesthetic transactions between readers and texts. It presupposes a reader actively involved with a text and refers to what he makes of his responses to the particular set of verbal symbols… It is an event in time” (12).

The author of the book illustrates further the reading process by giving examples of the reader’s interpretation of Shakespeare and the musical performance, stating that both text and reader are the essential components of this process: “A specific reader and a specific text at a specific time and place: change any of these, and there occurs a different circuit, a different event—a different poem” (14).

To illustrate the dynamics of the reading process, Rosenblatt introduces the idea of transaction that was developed by John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley that the author explains as “an ongoing process in which the elements and factors are, one might say, aspects of a total situation, each conditioned by and conditioning the other,” (17) but not a simple and linear interaction between reader and text. Furthermore, Rosenblatt strengthens the idea that “the living organism [reader] selects from its environment [text] the stimuli to which it will respond” (17), based on the transactional view, by the following examples:

Ø According to the Ames-Cantril experiments (transactional psychologists), the viewer describes the room as being rectangular although its shape is distorted because his perception depends on expectations and past experience.

Ø In ecological terms, man and environment are the part of each other. In other words, reader and text create an environment for the other during the reading process.

Ø Linguistic philosophers differentiate between an utterance and a speech act that reinforces Rosenblatt’s distinction between the text and the poem.

Rosenblatt concludes that reading process is the result of a complex social interaction where a poem is “an active process lived through during the relationship between a reader and a text” (21) creating a new world that becomes a part of the reader’s literary experience.

Questions:

1. What is “the true meaning” of a text? What are the criteria for “an accurate” interpretation of a text?

2. What makes one critic of, for example, a novel more authoritative for a reader than another one?