Literature as Exploration

Louise Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration has influenced literary theorists and teachers of literature at all levels. This attractive trade paperback edition features a new foreword by Wayne Booth, a new preface and retrospective chapter by the author, and an updated list of suggested readings.

In Literature as Exploration, Rosenblatt presents her unique theory of literature and focuses on the immense, often untapped, potential for the study and teaching of literature in a democratic society. The author's philosophy of literature is frequently cited as the first presentation of reader-response theory, but she differs from her successors in emphasizing both the reader and the text. Her "transactional" theory of literature examines the reciprocal nature of the literary experience and explains why meaning is neither "in" the text nor "in" the reader. Each reading is "a particular event involving a particular reader and a particular text under particular circumstances." And teachers of literature, Rosenblatt argues, play a pivotal role in influencing how students perform in response to a text.

Louise M. Rosenblatt was Professor of English Education at New York University. A graduate of Barnard College, where she taught for some years, she received a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Great Teacher Award from New York University, the Russell Award for Distinguished Research from the National Council of Teachers of English, and Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Arizona. Her publications include L'Idée de l'Art pour l'Art, Reading in an Age of Mass Communication (with W. S. Gray et al.), and numerous chapters and articles on literary theory. Wayne Booth was George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Chicago. His many books include The Rhetoric of Fiction and For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, both published by the University of Chicago Press.