Teaching Literature/Studying Literature in Literary Pedagogy and Literary Theory

Literary studies, in its two sides: teaching literature and studying literature, have suffered from a split in the profession between literary pedagogy and literary theories. A survey of the experience of some famous scholars who have tackled this issue in their writings is conducted to pinpoint the neglect in the part of people specialized in literary studies of the practical side of their work. Two points of convergence between literary pedagogy and literary theory are discussed. The first one presented two cases in which literary pedagogy was highly influenced by the ideas of two major shifts in critical theory: the formalist tendency of New Criticism and the reader-oriented tendency of the reader response approach. The second one discussed the efforts of the American educationalist and theorist Louise Rosenblatt in providing a theory of reading literary works in the light of what takes place in literature classrooms. The conclusions derived from this discussion lead to recommendations concerning the importance of making teaching of literature one of the academic interests and student preparation in departments of literature.

Reader Response to Feminism in Elizabeth Gilbert‘s Eat, Pray, Love

This study is about reader response to feminism in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (2006). The topic is analysed under the guidance of reader-response theory proposed by Louise Rosenblatt. The objectives of this study are twofold: first, to collect related readers’ response to feminism on the Goodreads website, one of the biggest and most famous book review websites worldwide; secondly, to discuss readers’ underpinning views towards feminism and their expectation for women in the 21st century. This paper seizes on qualitative research. The primary data of this study is gleaned from the Goodreads website. Other sources of data include literary works, book rating websites and news reports. The conclusion is that feminism is deemed as self-indulgence or a kind of self-discovery by different readers and such fact reflects, to some extent, what people expect for women in the 21st century.

MỘT SỐ HƯỚNG VẬN DỤNG LÍ THUYẾT ĐỘC GIẢ-PHẢN HỒI VÀO DẠY HỌC ĐỌC HIỂU VĂN BẢN VĂN HỌC THEO CHƯƠNG TRÌNH NGỮ VĂN 2018

Lí thuyết tiếp nhận là một trong những cơ sở xây dựng định hướng Chương trình Ngữ văn (CTNV) 2018 của Việt Nam về dạy đọc hiểu văn bản văn học; do đó, lí thuyết này cần được vận dụng vào thực tiễn dạy học đọc hiểu văn bản văn học ở trường phổ thông một cách đúng đắn. Độc giả-phản hồi (ĐG-PH), một nhánh của lí thuyết tiếp nhận, cho đến nay đã được vận dụng sâu rộng vào việc dạy học đọc hiểu ở trường phổ thông của nhiều nước trên thế giới. Bài viết nghiên cứu các nguyên tắc và biện pháp vận dụng lí thuyết ĐG-PH vào việc khai thác và phát huy phản hồi văn học của học sinh (HS) trong giờ học đọc hiểu văn bản văn học theo CTNV 2018. Phương pháp nghiên cứu được sử dụng là phân tích và tổng hợp lí thuyết, nhằm làm rõ nội hàm khái niệm “sự tương tạo thẩm mĩ” (Louise Rosenblatt) và “cộng đồng diễn giải” (Stanley Fish) trong lí thuyết ĐG-PH, phân tích định hướng của CTNV 2018 về dạy học đọc hiểu văn bản văn học, tổng hợp các cơ sở lí luận để đề xuất các nguyên tắc và biện pháp dạy học cụ thể cho giáo viên (GV) phổ thông.

El taller literario como estrategia pedagógica en el aula.

El tema del presente artículo aborda al taller literario como dispositivo didáctico en la enseñanza de la literatura apoyado desde soportes teóricos y metodológicos suficientes que sustentan claramente su desarrollo en el aula. Se encuentran hallazgos en los que demuestran ciertas ambigüedades con respecto a las habilidades que fortalece el taller literario, así como el enfoque casi exclusivo a la lectura, suprimiendo en cierta medida los procesos de escritura creativa en relación con un marco metodológico implícito que debido a su informalidad no puede aportar al desarrollo del taller como dispositivo pedagógico organizado. Son múltiples las voces que se han pronunciado sobre el taller literario: algunos desde su experiencia en el desarrollo de estos espacios para la creación literaria; otros desde el taller de lectura literaria en ámbitos escolares formales; otros tantos, desde una mirada de la formación de escritores y el problema de la enseñabilidad de la literatura como carrera de formación profesional. Gianni Rodari (1973), Louise Rosenblatt (1978), Benigno Delmiro Coto (2001), y finalmente, Teresa Colomer (2001). Igualmente, otras propuestas como los talleres de escritura creativa de RELATA (2010), muestran formas de sistematización de la práctica artística literaria. Este trabajo dialoga desde perspectivas generando estrategias que unen al taller de creación literario y el taller pedagógico en el contexto de la Pedagogía de la Literatura.

Reading and Responding to Poetry: To Know, to Experience

Three poet-researchers conduct three different readings of Tishani Doshi’s poem A Fable for the 21st Century. We ask how as creative practitioners and critics we can negotiate the desire for mastery of a text, and the dangers a semiotic reading presents, allowing for difference, indecision, and complexity. We present our initial readings of the poem and summarize our discussions of them grounded in the transactional reading theory of Louise Rosenblatt and nuanced by assemblage theory. A final section includes three original poems written in response to Doshi, together with a brief discussion of them, and forms part of our conclusion.

Sharing information through book reviews in blogs

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on information sharing by drawing on the reader-response theory developed by Louise Rosenblatt. To this end, information sharing is approached by examining how bloggers communicate their reading experiences of fiction and non-fiction books. Design/methodology/approach The conceptual framework is based on the differentiation between efferent and aesthetic reading stances specified by Rosenblatt. The efferent stance directs attention to what is to be extracted from reading for instrumental purposes such as task performance. The aesthetic stance focuses on what is being lived through during the reading event. Rosenblatt’s framework was elaborated by specifying eight categories of efferent reading and six categories of aesthetic reading. The ways in which bloggers communicate their responses to such readings were examined by scrutinising a sample of 300 posts from two book blogs. Findings The bloggers mainly articulated responses to efferent reading by sharing information about the content of the reviewed books, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Responses to aesthetic reading were mainly articulated by describing how the bloggers experienced the narrative, what kind immersive experiences they had and what kind of emotions were felt during the reading process. Research limitations/implications As the study is explorative in nature and focusses on a sample of blog posts, the findings cannot be generalised to depict how people share their responses to efferent and aesthetic reading in social media forums. Originality/value The paper pioneers by examining the potential of Rosenblatt’s theory in the study of sharing information about reading experiences in book blogs. The findings demonstrate that the categories of efferent and aesthetic reading can be elaborated further for the needs of information behaviour research.

PRODUCING GLOBAL MALAYSIAN SECONDARY STUDENTS THROUGH FOREIGN NOVELS: CHALLENGES

The study of literature provides a civilizing effect on a society anywhere around the world. Through these English kinds of literature, there are aspects of English culture encapsulated in it. This could potentially help students to develop as global citizens, which understand not only the feelings, settings, culture and even thoughts conveyed through the literature but being able to apply it to the real world, as a global citizen. If young students are not able to get such valuable exposure in schools, where are they supposed to receive such valuable input? Through this study, it is aimed to provide an overview of how foreign literature English novels chosen by the Ministry of Education has expanded the students' perspective as a global citizen. This paper aimed to reveal the challenges faced by teachers in using these texts in completing the objectives of producing students as global citizens. Thus, by applying Louise Rosenblatt Transactional Theory, it scaffolds this study to examine the challenges faced by English teachers in incorporating global citizenship values through the teaching of foreign novels in English. Data was collected via classroom observations, document analysis and interviews on both teachers and students. The data collected from the interviews, observations and item analysis were analyzed and results were conveyed in different themes, on the challenges faced by the respondents.�

Louise Rosenblatt

Louise Rosenblatt (b. 1904–d. 2005) was a highly influential thinker in literary and critical theory, reading pedagogy, and education. She was professor of education at New York University from 1948 until 1972, and she continued to teach for many years at other universities. The impact of her writings extends to aesthetics, communication and media studies, and cultural studies. Her transactional theory of reading literature earned a permanent place among methodologies applied to the study of reader comprehension and improving the teaching of reading, from preschool to college-age years. She is most widely known for her “reader response” theory of literature. The process of reading is a dynamic transaction between the reader and the text, in which meaningful ideas arise for readers from their own thoughtful and creative interpretations. Her first book, Literature as Exploration, which was published in 1938, has gone through five editions and remains in print in the early 21st century. Her last book, Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays, was published in 2005 and contained selected essays from each decade of her career. Rosenblatt’s view of literary experience threw down a challenge to a dominant paradigm during the 1940s and 1950s, namely the New Criticism. New Criticism held that authentic meanings of a piece of creative writing—a novel, story, drama, poem, and so on—are already within the text itself, requiring attention to that somewhat concealed yet objective truth. Rosenblatt took the pragmatist approach, starting from the aesthetics of reading. As a member of the Conference on Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences at Columbia University during the 1930s, she studied John Dewey, Charles Peirce, and William James. During this time, she married the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Ratner. Rosenblatt applied her knowledge of pragmatism to the question of understanding creative writing. For pragmatism, all experiences are creative fusions of intersecting processes, some from within and some from without. Any comprehension of a text blends the reader’s particular approach for appreciating it together with the capacity of the text to provoke a variety of stimulating ideas. The emotional and the factual are rarely found in pure forms; only a gradual range from the affective to the cognitive can characterize lived experience. Understanding the process of reading in its fundamental experiential situation has been a revolutionary philosophical position, impacting both childhood education and literary theory. Rosenblatt’s work continues to inspire fresh academic research and curricular innovations.