Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory

Summary of Rosenblatt,1994. "The transactional theory of reading and writing"

Traditional view of language: Language is a self-contained system of rules and conventions manipulated by language users to imprint messages on the minds of language receivers.

Transactional view of language:

• John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (1949): The word “transaction” is used to describe the relationships among knower, the knowing and the known, which condition and are conditioned by one another.
• Charles Pierce (1933, 1935): The association between a sign and its referent in the world occurs only in the mind of the human perceiving the sign, so language is inseparable from the humans who use it and the world in which they inhabit.

Transacting with the Text:

• The meaning of a text does not reside in the text or in the reader, but comes into being during the transaction between reader and text. Text remains marks on a surface until they are read. (E.g. Chomsky (1968) raised the example of “Flying planes can be dangerous” – the syntax is inferred based on the meaning selected by the reader.)
• Readers have a linguistic-experiential reservoir that resonates to the marks they see on a surface. They assume that the marks they see bear a coherent set of meanings and use their linguistic and life experiences to create meaning; at the same time, the range of possible meanings is limited by readers’ experience of these marks.
• A process of selective attention picks out elements that get synthesized into “meaning”. This choosing activity is influenced by physical, personal, social and cultural factors in the situation when the reading takes place.
• Readers begin with a vague impression of a text, and this impression is refined and revised as they continue reading. New ideas are tested for whether they fit into the emerging framework of meaning, and rejected or included into a revised framework.

The Reader’s Stance

• Texts are not expository or poetic, literary or non-literary on their own; those who give texts such labels are actually reporting their interpretation of the writer’s intention as to what stance readers should take. Instead, readers are free to choose their own stance, which guides his selective attention. This will fall somewhere in the efferent-aesthetic continuum.
  • EFFERENT stance: (Latin efferre, to carry away) This refers to the kind of reading where attention is centered mainly on what needs to be extracted and retained after reading. The reader focuses on public meanings which result from abstracting and analyzing information, directions, or conclusions to be retained, used, or acted on after reading.
  • AESTHETIC stance: This refers to the kind of reading where attention is mostly placed on the sensations, feelings, images and ideas experienced during reading, including the sounds and rhythms of the words themselves. The reader participates in the conflicts and resolutions of the scenes and images, and savors the situations and personalities. This “evocation” is felt to correspond to the text, and it is the what the reader responds to or interprets.
• Someone else can read a text efferently and paraphrase it for us to satisfy our efferent purpose; but no one can read a text aesthetically and experience a text for us.
• The experienced reader is alert for cues about which stance to adopt, such as the form of a poem, the title, or the opening lines.
• The reader may misconstrue such cues, or the cues may be confusing. It is worth noting that the reader’s schooling may indoctrinate the adoption of the same stance towards all texts, which might be different from what the writer intended. For example, students preparing for a quiz on facts about the characters and plot of a story may adopt a efferent stance. (This suggests that teachers could facilitate the adoption of both stances at different points of their students’ study of a text, regardless of whether the text appears to be literary or non-literary.)
• Evocation: what the reader construes as the meaning of the text.
• Response: Even as readers generate an evocation from a text, they are responding to it; this response may affect readers’ choices as they proceed with the reading.
• Interpretation: the process of reporting, analyzing, and explaining the evocation.