Deconstructing “Aesthetic Response”

English Education, V42 N2, January 2010
Deconstructing “Aesthetic Response” in SmallGroup Discussions about Literature: A Possible
Solution to the “Aesthetic Response” Dilemma
Anna O. Soter, Ian A. G. Wilkinson, Sean P. Connors,
P. Karen Murphy, and Vincent Fu-Yuan Shen
I
n conducting a federally funded study on the role of small-group
discussions as possible mechanisms for the development of high-level
comprehension (Soter et al., 2008; Wilkinson, Soter, & Murphy, 2007), we
conducted an exhaustive narrative analysis of over 300 scholarly products,
including empirical research, conceptual and theoretical scholarship, and
instructional applications, to identify parameters of productive small-group
discussions. These parameters included stance toward literary texts, of
which two were Rosenblatt’s (1978) aesthetic and efferent stances. We also
conducted an intensive analysis of classroom discussions about and around
literary text, from transcripts provided by the proponents of nine recognized
small-group discussion approaches.
Through our study of classroom talk about and around literary text, we
discovered that our application of Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995, 1978) “aesthetic”
stance to elementary (primarily Grades 4–6) students’ affective responses
to literary text uniformly lacked the simultaneous articulation of “the real
impact between the book and the mind of the reader” (p. 72), that is, what
Rosenblatt (1978) and Bogdan (1992) had in mind when they conceptualized
“aesthetic” response. Our solution was to search for a descriptor that would
adequately capture what we saw in these responses, that is, responses that
were indeed affective (personal, emotional) and experiential. We found that
Jakobson’s (1987) expressive function of language could more appropriately
and consistently describe such responses. We are aware that the concept
“expressive” carries with it some sizable baggage related to how it has been
used and perceived in the domain of writing instruction (most notably
promoted by Elbow, 1973).
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This article, then, focuses on a conceptual discussion that provides an
argument for utilizing what we have termed “expressive response” to account for readers’ personal connections to the texts they have read in terms
of “memories and free associations” (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 151). This then
leads to an exploration of the possibility of a third stance that can account
for the kinds of responses that any reader might make at different times
and for different reasons as well as Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995, 1978) aesthetic
response. The descriptor “aesthetic response” may have been asked to do
work for which it was never intended.
A Hypothetical Vignette: Responding to a Literary Text
In two hypothetical classrooms, one a ninth-grade classroom, the other a
fifth-grade classroom, students discuss literary texts they have read in smallgroup, literature-circle style. They’re used to each other, the small-group
format, and expressing their personal connections to texts they are reading.
Discussion in both groups is quite lively. The fifth graders have just finished
reading Katherine Paterson’s (1977) A Bridge to Terabithia, where Leslie
shares with Jess why Janice Avery, one of their classmates, has been crying.
Two of Janice’s so-called friends had revealed that Janice’s father beats her
badly. Jess observes that “you never mixed up troubles at home with life at
school” (p. 75). The big question they were to discuss is, “Why do you think
Janice blabbed to her friends about her dad?” One student says, thoughtfully,
When my dad beats me, I don’t want anyone to know. He beats me every
day. It’s awful, but I wouldn’t tell no one.
Another responds,
I felt so bad for her when I read that she’s beaten up all the time, but she
shudda kept her mouth shut. You don’t know what your dad might do if
he heard about her blabbing.
The students continue to discuss their responses to the situation, relating
their experiences of others as evidence of why Janice should or should not
tell her classmates. They reason, argue, and provide personal experiences.
They refer to the text: “Well, like the book says on page 74, ‘It’s a very complicated situation.’” Another says,
Yes, she musta had felt left out and maybe she thought she’d get, um . . .
some sympathy . . . like where Leslie says on page 74 that she understands
why Janice didn’t get on with people.
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In the other class, the ninth graders are discussing Paterson’s (1980) Jacob
Have I Loved. Their teacher favors using personal response to make deeper
connections with the texts. She encourages students to probe their responses,
to think about the text, including its style, which may have triggered their
response. Students discuss Call’s revelation that he and Caroline are to be
married. Their focus is on Louise’s response and connecting that to her
perceived history of always having lost out to her sister. One student mutters:
Just like me and Miranda! Things always fall into place for her. Not me! Oh
no! But wow . . . the author just blew me away when she got me right into
Louise’s interior. . . . Oh, I felt the room spin myself! And how she had Louise
stagger. I could just see the whole thing as if I was right in there with her.
Another says:
Can’t you just feel the lemon at the edges of your tongue when she has
Lou say “I guess it took you most of the train trip from New York to work
that one out.” Soooooo biting! And then, and then, I thought just what she
thought when Call wimpily says that Caroline’s “alone in that world.”
Grief, what a wimp! But wow too—the writer just draws you in so it’s as
if you’re one of them and then all the things that’ve happened to you in
your own life, sort of come up like ghosts to haunt you . . . like times when
you felt just like Louise.
The hypothetical personal response to a section of A Bridge to Terabithia is typical of what we have seen in the published literature on smallgroup discussions. The hypothetical response to Jacob Have I Loved is less
commonly reported as evidence of Rosenblatt’s aesthetic response. Both
exemplify the problem of the conflation of the personal (self-referential) and
aesthetic connections made in the enthusiasm to embrace the possibility
of the personal response in the context of classroom literature instruction.
The hypothetical fifth-grade responses suggest strong empathetic connections with the text and, therefore, typically involve the inclusion of parallel
personal experiences and feelings elicited by the text. However, the personal
responses of relatively unsophisticated readers (in terms of age and experience) do not typically include reference to elements of the text in ways that
reveal awareness by these readers of how those elements may have influenced their responses. They are not yet connoisseurs of reading, let alone
literary reading; that is, few have a sense of the qualities of the text that play
on their perception of the experiences portrayed that are as significant as
the content of the events themselves. They are experiencers of the text but
relatively unaware of what is playing into that experience.
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In contrast, the hypothetical ninth-grade students portray some measure of what Rosenblatt (1938/1995) intended teachers to understand in her
insistence that an “aesthetic response” must entail a
free, uninhibited emotional reaction to a work of art or literature as an
absolutely necessary condition of sound literary judgment. However, it is
not, to use the logician’s term, a sufficient condition. Without a real impact
between the book and the mind of the reader, there can be no process of
judgment at all, but honest recognition of one’s own reaction is not in itself
sufficient to ensure sound critical opinion. (p. 72; emphasis in original)
The ninth-grade responses are as uninhibitedly personal (and parallel) as those of the fifth graders, but there the similarity ends. They also
articulate that necessary textual connection that would enable, for example,
an ice-cream connoisseur to distinguish between one brand of vanilla ice
cream and another—texture, flavor, more or less of something that Rosenblatt
would argue is “in” the text itself. Therefore, she argues, “The transactional
view, while insisting on the importance of the reader’s contribution, does
not discount the text and accepts a concern for validity of interpretation”
(Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 151).
The Appeal of the “Aesthetic” Response Descriptor
Along with many other teachers and scholars during the past three decades,
we have also found Rosenblatt’s stances (the aesthetic in particular) to be
a significant breakthrough as legitimate responses to literary texts in K–12
and even some college classrooms. Unlike Richards (1929), who was deeply
troubled by what he saw as unexplored ignorance of textual history and
conventions in his students’ interpretations of their literary reading, Rosenblatt (1978 in particular) allows us to embrace what readers brought to their
experiencing of the literature being read. The Reader, The Text, The Poem
appeared as researchers in the field of reading (e.g., Rumelhart, 1981) were
offering, for example, schema theory as an explanation of why individual
(and, ultimately, collective) interpretations of reading could vary significantly. The soil was fertile for extending the implications of schema theory
to justify a significant role for individual, personal responses to texts. By the
mid-1980s, Rosenblatt’s (1978) transactional theory of readers’ responses
to literary text had become the primary explanatory theory for considering
readers’ affective engagement with literary texts and a primary justification
for taking such responses seriously.
The authors of this article, likewise, accepted Rosenblatt’s (1978)
aesthetic response as providing an adequate explanation for the nature of
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affective engagement in literary reading. Nevertheless, anyone who has followed various debates on the adequacy of Rosenblatt’s definition of “aesthetic
response” and her defense of aesthetic and efferent stances toward literary
text knows that considerable disquiet arose by the mid-1990s about the ways
in which researchers and teachers interpreted and applied these stances.
Indeed, Rosenblatt (1985, 1993, 1995, 2003) sought, in several publications,
to clarify her intentions regarding use of these concepts and choice of nomenclature. Among her most earnest and well-intentioned critics, Purves
(1988), Faust (2000), Lewis (2000), and Dressman and Webster (2003) sought
to unpack the problem of an implied continuum in the aesthetic-efferent
distinction, and also argued that Rosenblatt was more text-oriented than
many teachers thought she was. Nevertheless, necessary and valuable as
this reinterpretation of Rosenblatt’s (1978) most well-known and frequently
applied aspect of her transactional theory of response has been, a viable and
additional alternative to “aesthetic” response has not, to our knowledge,
been proposed. Some fine-tuning of the way in which we have described
students’ non-efferent responses (i.e., typically termed “aesthetic responses”
in the published literature) is warranted and timely. The aesthetic-efferent
distinction has proven to be problematic because it does not account for
a range in non-efferent responses in relation to literary reading. Describing these responses as “expressive” may allow us to honor the commonly
expressed, highly subjective responses as valid and appropriate and assign
the descriptor “aesthetic response” to the kinds of responses we believe
Rosenblatt (1938/1995; 1978) had in mind when she articulated the concept
and continued to defend it.
A Brief Account of the Enduring “Aesthetic” Response Dilemma
In contributing to the evolution of the still-viable reader response theory in
the secondary English classroom since the 1980s, scholars have built on a
momentum that began not with the still-current and often-cited publication
of Rosenblatt’s (1978) The Reader, The Text, The Poem, but with the adoption of her work by others in K–12 literacy education—most notably Purves
and Rippere (1968), Squire (1964), Applebee (1978), and Probst (1988)—who
popularized reader response theory and who foregrounded the concept of
aesthetic response Rosenblatt (1938/1995) had developed in her earlier work,
Literature as Exploration. This radical shift away from the heavily text-based
focus of traditional criticism, articulated most clearly in New Criticism and
other formalist approaches to reading, ushered in an era in school-based
literature instruction that embraced young readers’ personal connections
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to literary texts as a significant factor in the literary reading enterprise and
foregrounded the active (and necessary) role of the reader. However, Squire
(1985) challenges this quest to honor students’ engagement with literary text
at the expense of the text, noting that nothing in Rosenblatt (1978), Probst
(1984) or others’ contributions on “response to literature” advocated “ignoring” the quality of the literary work in eliciting response” (p. 19).
Appropriating Rosenblatt’s (1978) concept of “aesthetic response”
to account for the personal connections that readers make to literary texts
was, and still is, not without difficulties, one of which is the enduring debate regarding the nature and qualities of response. Personal engagement
is evident in the following example:
I felt sad when he said “I have something to say to you: Goodbye.” I felt sad
when he had to move back and forth.
What we don’t know is whether the student who uttered this response was
conscious of some element in the text that triggered his or her sadness, since
that awareness is not included in the response. It appears that the response
focuses on the reader’s feelings, which may or may not be unique and which
may or may not be shared by the character implied in the “he” reference in
the response. This kind of response has been commonly held as an example
of a Rosenblattian (1978) aesthetic response in the published research.
The Case for Adding “Expressive Response”
In light of the conundrum surrounding the nature of aesthetic response,
and given our desire to make a case for the role and value of personal connections to the literature that is read in K–12 literacy/literary education,
we propose adding the descriptor “expressive response” to remove from our
work the enduring and unresolved struggle to define the term “aesthetic,”
while at the same time providing a potentially meaningful and recognizable way of evaluating students’ emotional engagement with texts as well
as accounting for responses that live up to Rosenblatt’s intention in her use
of “aesthetic response.”
The additional descriptor—expressive response—is derived from Jakobson’s (1987) functions of language. Jakobson defines the “expressive”
or “emotive” function of language as that which is focused on the speaker,
and in which the speaker utters a “direct expression of his or her attitude
toward what he or she is speaking about. It tends to produce an impression
of a certain emotion whether true or feigned . . . the emotive function . . .
flavors to some extent, all our utterances (hence it is not absent when another
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function may be primary)” (p. 44). Adopting the term “expressive” removes
a troubling feature that literacy educators face when they use Rosenblatt’s
descriptor, aesthetic response, to refer to the personal (whether emotional
or experiential) connections that readers make to literary texts—unlike the
latter, expressive response does not entail a need for readers to reflect on the
role that the text plays in shaping their response, a point on which Rosenblatt
(1938/1995, 1978) insisted.
Scope of the Expressive Response
In Literature as Exploration, Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995) perspective on
younger readers is clearly developmental, although responding to literature
self-referentially, a notion accommodated by the “expressive” function as
defined by Jakobson (1987) and Britton (1970, 1971), seems natural to even
the most analytical and sophisticated of readers at whatever age. The following expressive examples are drawn from written responses made by college
seniors in a Young Adult Literature course:
“I was so moved . . . it’s a book you can’t put down.”
“Charlotte Doyle makes me remember that time when I was a little
girl.”
“I was instantly bonded with Phillip as I found out he was a track
runner. I am a track runner.”
“I really would have liked Lyddie to end up with Luke Stevens so she
would have someone there for her.”
At the same time, reading in school contexts embraces a notion of development and assumes a continuum of learning as a goal. Thus, Rosenblatt
(1938/1995) argued, personal responses to literature are not only valid but
also essential to enable the movement toward a transaction between the
reader and the text in such a way that the reader eventually demonstrates
literary sensibility, or what Rosenblatt termed “sensitivity to techniques
of literature” (p. 50). In practice, in a discussion involving a literary text,
students might move in and out of self-referential response toward an acknowledgment of the role of the text in the elicitation of such self-referential
experiences. The following excerpt illustrates this movement quite well:
I was seduced by his [Cormier’s The Bumblebee Flies Anyway] attention to
detail . . . like freshwater fish bated by its captor, I was teased and tantalized,
then yanked into the story’s element of suspense. (qtd. in Soter, 1999, p. 109)
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Although the term “expressive” carries with it a free-for-all, anything-goesapproach to writing instruction, it nevertheless has utility and is appropriate
for English language arts teachers in providing another helpful descriptor
for our work. It has utility because it indeed is self-referential in function,
and in this sense it allows for the inclusion of references to personal experiences that parallel those in the text (e.g., “I had
a brother who looked after me too”), as well as Although the term “expressive”
affective (i.e., emotional) responses to the text carries with it a free-for-all,
that are similarly self-referential (e.g., “I was anything-goes-approach to
sad when Joey died because it reminded me of writing instruction, it neverthe time my best friend died”).
theless has utility and is approFor these reasons, we are not propos- priate for English language arts
ing that we replace “aesthetic” response with teachers in providing another
“expressive”; rather, there is a need to expand helpful descriptor for our work.
the range of responses, thus enabling teachers
to identify and honor all the responses that readers make (whatever their
age, orientation, or experience as readers) with respect to literary text. This
argument is supported by Rosenblatt’s (1978) struggle to resolve the reader’s
“absorption” in the experiencing of a text: “The aesthetically-driven reader
. . . must decipher the images or concepts or assertions that the words point
to, he also pays attention to the associations, feelings, attitudes and ideas
that these words and their referents arouse in him” (p. 27). As Rosenblatt
stated, “The aesthetic stance should not be confused with free association or
a simple reverie . . . the concept of transaction emphasizes the relationship
with, and continuing awareness of the text . . . during the literary experience, concentration on the words of the text is perhaps even more keen
than in an efferent reading . . . the aesthetic stance heightens awareness of
the words as signs with particular visual and auditory characteristics and
as symbols” (p. 29).
Expressive vs. Aesthetic Responses
In our small-group discussion project, we were challenged to find examples
of what would constitute this view of an aesthetic response—an interesting
dilemma in itself. Examples of what have been described as “aesthetic”
responses, but which we have reidentified as “expressive” responses, are
illustrated in Figure 1. These have been drawn from published articles on
the value of small-group discussions as a context for promoting students’ engagement with literary texts. Publication years but no additional identifiers
for these articles have been provided. Our intent in using these examples is
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1989
S1: My dog is just like them . . . just lays over there.
S2: Oh, that’s sad.
S3: Does it ever eat?
S1: Oh it eats sometimes . . . just lays over there.
1992
S1: My brother Bill hurts my brother Matthew and Matthew gets all
the blame every single time.
S2: Once I saw a cartoon like “Tom and Jerry” and Tom, the cat,
always gets his nose right off.
S3: It’s not really funny to get a bee sting.
1993
S1: She didn’t like the grandpa dying.
S1: Oh . . . the dog dying . . .
S2: Fine, I had three dogs that died so it was OK.
S3: I had two.
1994
S: It was sad all those people dead or in hospital. Why can’t people
talk instead of wars, fights, and bombs? If everyone was nice to each
other, everything would be alright.
1996
S: It reminded me of when I came home happy and I got out of the truck with
Trend and my sister told me Grandma passed away. I remember when I went
to her room. I was real uncomfortable sitting and talking when she died on
the bed. I was in Houston and didn’t want to leave Grandma.
1997
S: It was like I’ll Fix Anthony. I’ll fix my sister too. She always thinks she’s
the boss, so I’ll fix (her). (name of sister).
1999
S: I felt sad when he said “I have something to say to you: ‘Goodbye.’”
I felt sad when he had to move back and forth.
2000
S: Imagine it was your birthday and you went to the movies and someone
brought you a rabbit that was a vampire, what would you have done if you
had seen a vampire?
Figure 1. Examples of Student Talk Illustrative of Expressive Connections to Text from
Studies Published between 1989 and 2000
purely illustrative and demonstrative of the confusion we have experienced
as literature and literacy researchers since reader response and its most
often-cited proponent, Rosenblatt (1978), emerged in the field of reading.
While examples of the types of response, which we argue are illustrative of “expressive” response, are common, even quite prolific, parallel
examples in the published literature of the kind of “aesthetic” response as
defined by Rosenblatt have proved to be more elusive. Several examples (see
Figure 2) were drawn from a previous publication by one of the authors of
this article, as examples of what Bogdan (1992) presents as the “simultaneous perception and experience of the total form of the literary work, however fleeting that glimpse might be” (p. 113). Bogdan (1992) comes closest
to identifying that mysterious union of mind and emotion, apprehension
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Lois Lowry’s The Giver is a truly rare literary find; an entertaining, thought-provoking book
that you can’t put down and don’t want to end.
It was Mary Call who grabbed me by the neck and yanked me into the book [Where the
Lillies Bloom]. As with most books in its category, the book lived beyond its 210th page.
I was seduced by his [Cormier’s The Bumblebee Flies Anyway] attention to detail . . . like
freshwater fish bated by its captor, I was tease and tantalized, then yanked into the story’s
element of suspense.
I was so caught up in it [ Jacob Have I Loved] that I just wanted to continue reading it without interruption. I was so moved by the novel that the images did not leave me quickly, and
I was genuinely shocked when others who had read the work thought Louise was a whiner.
I loved the book [ Jacob Have I Loved] and would read it again. Why I loved it is a difficult
question to answer.
Note: Examples drawn from Soter (1999).
Figure 2. Examples of Talk Illustrative of Aesthetic Connections to Text
and comprehension of the literary work that underscores what Rosenblatt
(1938/1995) attempts to capture in her description of this kind of response
as “aesthetic.” In Bogdan’s account, such a response (“stasis”) “resides in
the instinctual and instantaneous apprehension of and union with the art
object in terms of its imaginative and emotional impact” (p. 113).
The notion of the aesthetic as it is conceived by Ingarden (1973), whose
work Rosenblatt (1978) cites in The Reader, The Text, The Poem, is also helpful here and serves to more fully illuminate her thinking. Like Rosenblatt,
Ingarden (1973) insists on the need to acknowledge the role that the literary
text plays in shaping the aesthetic experience. He suggests that the onset
of aesthetic experience is signaled by the “original emotion,” that is, “an
excitement resulting from that quality which struck us or forced itself upon
us in the perceived object” (p. 189). The original emotion is sated, Ingarden
argues, only when the percipient reflects on the quality or property that
precipitated it:
After the phase of the emotion, which dominates us for a moment, follows
the return to the quality which aroused us. Although the apprehension of it
takes place in some cases on the basis of the earlier perception, the previously described modification of this perception has the result, above all,
that the relevant quality now steps into the foreground and is apprehended
much more distinctly and in greater fullness than in its first appearance (p.
197; emphasis added)
Rosenblatt’s (1978) view of the aesthetic—which emphasizes a need
for readers to acknowledge the literary text as a coparticipant in the literary
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transaction—is not consistent with the notion of response that has dominated
the field of literacy instruction today, one that has emphasized personal
response without placing a corresponding emphasis on the literary text.
Again, we believe that adding the term “expressive response” overcomes
this dilemma. Doing so allows a conceptualization of the “aesthetic” and
“expressive” responses in the following ways—the former including the
literary work or text as a co-subject of attention, the latter focusing more on
the personal connections and associations that a text inspires. Figure 3 represents a composite of features that we would expect to find in an “aesthetic
response” and in an “expressive response.”
The features of aesthetic response represented in Figure 3 are based
on Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995, 1978, 2003) delineations as well as arguments set
forth by other scholars (Abrams, 1979; Bleich, 1978; Ingarden, 1973; Iser, 1978;
Jakobson, 1987; Jauss, 1982). Conversely, the features of expressive response
are based on the work of Jakobson (1960, 1987), Elbow (1973), and Britton
(1970, 1971). It is worth noting that Britton’s use of the term “expressive”
relates to his theory of language functions, which he conceptualized as being
“based on a continuum of language roles” (Pinnell & Jagar, 2003, p. 897),
identifiable through different phases of the child’s language development,
including the participant and spectator roles. The spectator role involves using “language to daydream, chat about experiences, contemplate events, tell
stories, and preserve delight in utterance” (p. 897). Britton based his three
major functions of language (transactional, expressive, and poetic) on the
work of functional linguists (e.g., Halliday, 1969, 1978). For our purposes, it
is useful to note the synergistic emergence of a linguistic function (i.e., the
Primary Features of an Aesthetic Response to Literature
• A sense of the work as well as one’s response to it
• An appreciation of the craft of the work
• Interaction between the perceived and the perceiver
• Engagement with the work
Primary Features of an Expressive Response to Literature
• The work sparks a personal connection or memory
• Personal experience parallels or takes off from the connection
• The response is primarily in terms of content, as opposed to form, or even a mix of
content and form
• Engagement with the work is “translated” into personal experience
Figure 3. Distinguishing Features of an Aesthetic and an Expressive Response to
Literature
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expressive function) that appeared in literary study at approximately the
same time it appeared in the context of describing the language development of children.
Using the “expressive” function, which emphasizes the individual’s
articulation of how she or he experiences and responds to life in general,
to capture the individual’s personal connections to literary text seems to us
a natural expansion of its role. The children’s responses in Figure 1 were
drawn from publications that identified those responses as examples of Rosenblatt’s aesthetic response. While we agree that these responses take place
“in response to” the texts students were discussing, we suggest that they do
not reflect Rosenblatt’s notion of a “transaction” between reader and text so
much as they reflect the reader’s means of “exchanging opinions, attitudes,
beliefs, and experiences” (Pinnell & Jagar, 2003, p. 897). Significantly, these
excerpts illustrate the value of such exchanges, a value that is undermined
if they are considered unsatisfactory examples of aesthetic response. That is,
in the absence of the term “expressive” response, there is no adequate way
of categorizing these responses in a manner that identifies the important
role they play in demonstrating student learning and student engagement
in response to literary reading.
Rosenblatt’s “Aesthetic Response” and “Reader-Plus-TextOriented Theories”
As many in the field of literature instruction know, Rosenblatt (1985, 1993,
1994, 1995, 2003) sought to clarify her use of the term “aesthetic response” in
several publications and insisted that the distinctions scholars made between
her efferent/aesthetic stances were literal and narrowly conceived. Her
primary clarification—specifically, that it would be more useful to consider
“the terms ‘efferent’ and ‘aesthetic’” as “referring to a continuum of ‘mixes’
of different proportions that range from predominantly public (efferent) to
predominantly private (aesthetic)” (Rosenblatt, 1995, p.350)—was not successful in quelling the ongoing debate as to what is aesthetic and what is
efferent response in reading (see, for example, Dressman & Webster, 2003;
Faust, 2000; Lewis, 2000).
In a more recent explication of her concept of aesthetic response,
Rosenblatt (2003) locates her transactional theory of reading in a category
that, to the best of our knowledge, had not previously been articulated:
Reader-Plus-Text-Oriented Theories (p. 70). In doing so, she distinguishes
between reader- and text-oriented theories of reader response theory. Among
the reader response theories Rosenblatt locates in “Reader-Plus-Text-Oriented
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Theories” are reception theory (e.g., Iser, Jauss, Mailloux) and her transactional theory. Significantly, she “rejects” the “reader response label” on the
grounds that it is “too often interpreted simply as a critical approach with
personal response as its end product” (p. 70). This, perhaps, was the price
unwittingly paid by having been mostly “read with an eye to pedagogical
implication” (Purves, 1988) and because she held a position in education
where such an implication is usually drawn. Unlike Richards (1929), whose
concern was that his students’ responses are evidence of failure to read
and judge poetry in ways appropriate to the university setting, Rosenblatt
(1938/1995) is marginally concerned with possible pedagogical implications
in delineating her position on literary texts and readers. Rather, her focus
is not on students per se but on “human concerns” with literary texts in
general, influenced as she was by the “philosophers and anthropologists” she
encountered while pursuing an undergraduate degree (Purves, 1988, p. 66).
Although Rosenblatt (2003) insists that her transactional theory captures the relationship between reader, transaction, and text, and although
she concedes that there is no single correct interpretation of the text, she
nevertheless maintains that some “interpretations are better and have
more ‘warranted assertibility’ than others” (p. 71). As such, her ReaderPlus-Text-Oriented response theories reflect Blau’s (1993) goal of creating
reading groups that respond to literary texts in
Much of the ongoing confu- ways that are “intellectually responsible” and
sion surrounding the notion of that embrace the notion that all readers have
“aesthetic response” seems to something potentially useful and interesting to
be a result of a tendency on the offer to collective understanding and appreciapart of literacy educators to use tion of such texts (p. 10).
Much of the ongoing confusion surroundthe term to refer to the personal,
ing
the
notion of “aesthetic response” seems to
affectively based experiencing of
literary texts by young, relatively be a result of a tendency on the part of literacy
inexperienced readers. educators to use the term to refer to the personal,
affectively based experiencing of literary texts
by young, relatively inexperienced readers. Such usage is not, in our view,
consistent with the manner in which Rosenblatt (1938/1995, 1978) conceived
of the term. Lewis’s (2000) assertion that we have “conflated the personal
and the aesthetic” (p. 255) speaks directly to the heart of the issue. Lewis
argues for a “broader view of what pleasurable aesthetic reading can mean”
through reading that “addresses the social and political dimensions of texts”
(p. 264), a position with which we heartily concur.
Again, introducing “expressive response” risks the baggage that the
term “expressive” carries, linked as it has been to Elbow’s (1973) quest to
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democratize the writing classroom, which at times has been perceived as a
free-for-all. A similar democratization of the literature classroom has been
equated with reader response theories (Probst, 2003), particularly those
that emphasize the role of personal connections with texts (whether one
produces them in the writing classroom or their re-construction in the
literature classroom). Nevertheless, “expressive response” can account for
the kinds of personal responses many of us have observed in the literature
classroom. Its appropriation by literacy educators offers a potential solution
to the conundrum that Rosenblatt’s “aesthetic” response poses.
“Expressive” vs. “Aesthetic Response” in K–12 Literacy
Education
In the context of K–12 students’ engagement with literary texts, “aesthetic
response” has been understood to refer to the experiential connection
manifested in student talk or student response journals. Yet theoretical
pronouncements concerning aesthetic response and aesthetic reading, including some made by Rosenblatt (1978) herself, have come from thinkers
who worked with early or advanced college students or who had the luxury
of theorizing about aesthetics, aesthetic response, and aesthetic reading
having taught only graduate students or no students at all. Significantly, no
theorist seems to have derived the notion of an “aesthetic reading” or an
“aesthetic response” by observing literary reading in the context of compulsory education—that is, in the K–12 setting. That we have adopted, without
major modification, these concepts (and terms) for the K–12 setting is also,
therefore, problematic for several reasons:
> First, in appropriating the term “aesthetic response” and the concept behind it, we have moved it from a context of reading for personal pleasure and edification to one in which reading is not only
required but also assessed according to perceived norms of desirable
performance. Granted, students are able to enter the world of a book
and engage with it deeply in the context of a classroom. Nevertheless, as Applebee (1974), Purves and Pradl (2003), Langer (1998), and
others have observed, the primary motive for reading in schools usually has little to do with aesthetics. Instead, it stems from a desire
to extract information about reading as a performance related to
decoding, comprehension, and, possibly, critical thinking.
> Second, as we know from research on reading performance (Allington & Johnston, 2002; Taylor, Pearson, Garcia, Stahl, & Bauer,
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2006), if readers are not sufficiently proficient to enable them to
move beyond the “mechanics” of navigating the words on the page,
they are not in a position to move to a level of interaction with the
text that enables them to enter into that world in such a way as to
engage aesthetically.
> Third, Rosenblatt (1938/1995) does not conceptualize aesthetic
response in relation to an audience of younger readers. Instead, she
expects younger readers “to grow into the emotional and intellectual and aesthetic maturity necessary for appreciating great works
of literature” (p. 276).
It would appear, then, that we have appropriated a term that was intended
to describe a particular way of connecting with literary text, and applied it
to a population for which it was neither conceptualized nor intended.
With regard to the aesthetic/efferent distinction many of us have
made based on readings of Rosenblatt’s work, Purves (1988) suggests (and
we believe that Rosenblatt would concur) that the two stances represent
“dispositions” that readers assume in relation to texts—that is, readers
“make choices” (p. 70), often at an unconscious level, regarding the stance
they will allow to color their reading. In the context of schooling, doing so is
problematic—readers have historically had little (if any) say over the stance
they take toward literary texts. Instead, pedagogical and assessment practices
have often necessitated their adopting an efferent stance. Yet as literature
discussion groups (e.g., Book Club, Literature Circles, Grand Conversations)
have grown increasingly popular in reading and language arts classrooms,
many educators have attempted to encourage an “aesthetic” stance in a variety of ways—e.g., open-ended questions that do not assume a pre-ordained
answer (Eeds & Wells, 1989), sharing the “floor” with students so that they
are encouraged to expand on their responses to texts (McMahon, Raphael, &
Goatley, 1995), using reflective responses to literature in writing portfolios
(Rogers, 1997), illustrating one’s response to literary text (Soter, 1993), or
using dramatic interpretation (Kelly, 1992).
Inspired by researchers who examined student response to (and engagement with) literary texts (e.g., Applebee, 1978; Faust, Cockrill, Hancock,
& Issertstedt, 2005; Gambell, 1993; Purves & Rippere, 1968), and endeavoring
to develop student-centered approaches to literature instruction, literacy
educators appropriated the term “aesthetic” to describe responses in which
students related events and characters they read about to incidents and
people in their own lives. Such experiential connections to literature were
presumed to “hook” readers to texts, thereby generating a new enthusiasm
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for reading literature that many in the field saw as rich ground for fostering
more engaged and cognitively deeper reading.
The Problem of Defining “Aesthetic” and “Aesthetic Response”
According to Graesser, Person, & Johnston (1996), scholars face several
obstacles in their efforts to identify the nature of the aesthetic experience
involved in reading literary texts. They argue, for example, that there is no
essence to the quality of aesthetic objects and to aesthetic experiences, the
result of which makes it possible for readers to respond to aspects of literature—novelty, literary devices, prototypical plots, good form, unity in the
text, psychologically rich themes and content, and so forth. They conclude
that “aesthetic quality is clearly a complex, multi-faceted construct” and are
not surprised to learn “that scholars have been unable to identify any single
essence of aesthetic experience and encountered widespread disagreement
as to the meaning of aesthetic quality” (p. 9).
Graesser et al. (1996) also suggest that it is “difficult to consciously
identify and articulate the components of aesthetic experience as noted
in a simple study of what is defined as ‘literary—i.e., good art’” (p. 10). To
support this claim, they provide data from their study in which “15–20% of
two groups each of 20 college students characterized [good art] as abstract,
unique, unpredictable, accepted universally; 20–25% characterized it as
pleasing to the senses, realistic; 13%–30% characterized it as interesting,
entertaining, understandable, evoking thoughts or ideas, educational, creative, evoking of emotion” (p. 10).
Although they are willing to accept the assertion that “imaginative
processes are at the heart of encounters between readers and texts,” Goetz
and Sadoski (1996) question the extent to which it is possible to “measure elicited imagery and emotional response” (p. 221). To account for the “dearth of
studies on this topic,” they suggest that aesthetic response is “too private, too
ephemeral and idiosyncratic to be accessible to objective scientific inquiry”
(p. 222). Even if empathy does play a role in comprehension, they argue, it
remains difficult to determine whether empathy generates comprehension
or “comprehension generates the capacity to empathize” (p. 255).
Bleich (1980) and Miall (1996) see no argument for response being the
starting point for the study of aesthetic experience, but neither moves in the
direction of conflating the response itself as evidence of aesthetic engagement—rather, Bleich (1980) in particular sees response as a “reaction to an
aesthetic object” (p. 138), whether this aesthetic object is a text, a work of
visual art, a sculpture, and so on. In support of this assertion, he notes that
Rosenblatt cautions against readers straying too far from the text (p. 145).
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The difficulty of assessing the aesthetic nature of response and experience is not lost on Rosenblatt (1938/1995) either. In her view, “the student
would tend not to speak of this phase”—that is, entering the world of the text,
living through it—“precisely because of [the] formal and stylistic elements”
that define whether a text is a work of art or not (p. 276). Furthermore,
she suggests that “the entire experience of reading has a structure and an
inner logic, a completeness that only a great work of art can offer” (p. 10).
For Rosenblatt, the reader’s sense of this experience, which she assumes is
perceived as a whole, remains intuitive, not yet articulated; only after “an
inductive study of the text” can the response be identified and supported in
what she describes as a “more controlled, more and more valid or defensible
response to the text” (p. 267).
This hardly resembles the libertarian Rosenblatt who supposedly
praised the role of individual, idiosyncratic responses to literary text. Dressman and Webster (2003) suggest that Rosenblatt’s stance on the role of
individual response “requires teachers and critics to respect students’ individual experiences of texts while holding them to precise expression and
well-grounded reasoning, and urges readers to reassert the social and cultural
benefits of aesthetic experiences in their everyday lives”—a role for response
that is “as relevant and radical in the year 2001 as it was in 1938” (p. 142).
Conclusions and Future Directions
That Rosenblatt (1995) feels impelled to defend her apparent distinctions
between aesthetic and efferent reading and to argue that they are not diametrically opposed, and that she has not been, as Dressman and Webster
(2003) point out, entirely consistent in her defining of “aesthetic response,”
suggests that it is time to consider the addition of a descriptor that avoids
the need (inherent in retaining the concept and term “aesthetic”) of having to qualify it. Again, Rosenblatt (1938/1995) does not valorize response
to a literary text at the expense of the text, nor does she eulogize personal
response. To the contrary, she argues that
[t]here is nothing in the recognition of the personal nature of literature
that requires acceptance of the notion that every evocation from a text is
as good as another. We need only think of our successive readings of the
same text . . . to know that we can [and do] differentiate. Undisciplined,
irrelevant, or distorted emotional responses and the lack of relevant experience, or knowledge, will of course, lead to inadequate interpretations
of the text. (p. 267)
As readers may likely agree, the term “aesthetic” is culturally and his-
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torically loaded, and it inevitably brings with its use expectations of behaviors
that are notoriously difficult to capture (Bleich, 1978; Goetz & Sadoski, 1996;
Graesser et al., 1996; Iser, 1978). Researchers who have argued in support of
Rosenblatt’s “aesthetic response” might find the addition of the descriptor
“expressive response” useful, and potentially less confounding, in terms of
understanding what affective responses contribute to the process of reading
literary text. As Miall (1993) suggests, doing so may therefore provide the
field with a “set of practices modeled on an enhanced understanding of the
response process” (p. 63) that would enable teachers to better understand
the role of personal response in the context of literary reading. Common
sense in terms of recognizing personal experiences as readers of literature
(as distinct from readers of informational text) should enable an affirmation that “literary texts seem to possess certain features that require (or
at least, invite) the aesthetic reading” (Miall, 1993, p. 65). Again, adding
“expressive response” does not mean adding a developmental descriptor.
It’s entirely feasible that readers will, at times, respond “expressively” and,
at other times, “aesthetically” for a variety of reasons. However, it is also
potentially useful to include a descriptor that might enable teachers to
determine whether students are (or are not) expanding the range of their
response profiles over time. Growth is, after all, one of the primary goals of
any educational endeavor.
For young readers, personal response is typically not articulated in
terms of what Miall (1993) terms the “deviant features” of either literary
prose or poetry (p. 65). Rather, as McGinley et al. (1997) found, young readers
are more likely to be stimulated to link what they experience in the literary
text to similar events or emotions in their own lives. This may be perceived by
some as developmental; however, it may be just as likely that young readers
come to reading “fresh” and have yet to fully absorb the mores of reading in
ways promoted by schooling. If “emotions primarily represent self-referential
concerns,” as Miall (1993, p.75) argues on the basis of several studies, then
Jakobson’s (1987) equally self-referential “expressive” function of language
provides a term that can account for a range of personal connections that
readers make to literary texts, thus allowing a differentiation between those
connections as either “aesthetic response” or “an expressive response.”
Adding the category “expressive response” to a response repertoire (as both
teachers and researchers) helps to characterize a range of responses to literature—a range already existing—without having to label affective responses
as being failed aesthetic ones. Readers, at all levels of sophistication, will
at some time, with some literary text, respond expressively. And authentic
literary reading allows that such response may be the only response to a
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particular literary text. Interactions with other literary texts at other times
may invite or elicit other kinds of response (i.e., aesthetic and/or efferent)
and may invite multiple kinds of responses.
Finally, by clarifying important distinctions between “expressive”
and “aesthetic” responses to literature, teachers of literature might find an
avenue for self-exploration—that is, an exploration of their own responses
to literature and how those responses influence them in terms of responses
they favor from students. Such an exploration may, in turn, lead to a reconsideration of how students’ responses to literature are assessed.
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Anna O. Soter is a professor at The Ohio State University, School of Teaching
and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology, Columbus, Ohio.
Ian A. G. Wilkinson is an associate professor at The Ohio State University,
School of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology, Columbus, Ohio.
Sean P. Connors is a Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University, School of
Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology, Columbus, Ohio.
P. Karen Murphy is a professor in the Department of Educational and School
Psychology and Special Education at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania.
Vincent Fu-Yuan Shen is an assistant professor in the Department of English
at National Taitung University, Taitung, Taiwan.
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