growling flowers

"these so-called avant-garde artists seem to be rediscovering the basic alphabet of aesthetics; though their works are often very minor indeed, they may be performing a function by educating a public largely wedded to the purely efferent attitudes to begin the slow development of aesthetic attention to an awareness of their own responses." (Rosenblatt, 82)

tell me do you feel it?

As I started to read Rosenblatt's The RTP, I was initially worried, as I wasn't getting into it as much as her other work. But I think that's between the first two chapters are essentially fluently rewritten ways to describe the interdependent triad of reader, text, and poem of meaning making. Chapter 3 was where I started to become more involved, particularly with her analysis of efferent and aesthetic reading. Beginning with one of my new favorite ideas of "burning through" a reading, living through it, she delineates the kinds of approach we take to reading between reading to remember or apply (more typically found in scientific reading) and the pure art, affective stance, like Keats writes about in "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again." In addition to the combined stance needed to read and make sense by use of referents or imagination, "different aesthetic transactions with the same text may also produce different or levels of experience, depending on the nature, state of mind, or past experience of the reader." So, not only can someone not read a poem for you, you can't read it the same way twice. This makes me wonder if the question of what classics are universal even matters.

Efferent-dominant reading is what we're teaching kids to do. Read for details, read to answer the questions right. There's no way to test on affect, on aesthetic, as it's particular to each person. I felt a pang of guilt, remembering my first year of teaching at HSA, first year with my own room, with no real supervison as it was a charter school, copying out worksheets from suggested workbooks that invited the kids to classify poem tones by their titles. Extracting democratic messages from decontextualized political speeches. No wonder my kids got great TAKS scores. But now I'm not so proud of it. Luckily they had enough experience and enough academic confidence to read for pleasure as well. But what if we could get kids to feel like this:

only slightly more intelligently.

Thought on the transformative power of the narrative--I've read the Bible, been to Sunday school and church all through my youth, and have taken classes in religion, yet what leads me to know/believe that there is a heaven is a story about a young man who was killed in a hunting accident, and as he bled to death, he looked around him and said, "it's so beautiful," before dying. This story might have left me somewhat nonplussed had I seen in a movie or novel, except that this was a truth story, and happened to my great uncle. Experience and culture does make a difference.

Adolesense

I've found that if I stop to post on every interesting chunk of Rosenblatt I will have no time for any other classes. Nevertheless,

In the 3rd and 4th chapters, she begins to address concerns as an English educator--schools are too often failing to provide contexts for students to experience a vital personal reaction to art in the form of text. Schools make a frame with no picture--students regurgitate what they think the teacher thinks of a story, and fail to give a real response. Things don't change because teachers uphold certain expectations (as do parents and everyone raised in traditional mainstream public schools) of what school should do and look like: writing traditional essays and answering multiple choice questions about who the main character was. Teachers have to value true literature experiences themselves, liberate pupils from self-defeating practices, give them freedom to wrestle with ideas and emotions, and not place so much value on a particular form of response.

"The study of literature should give the student the form of emotional release that all art offers and, at the same time, without strain or pressure, should help him gain ever more complex satisfactions from literature." (71)

"A poem or a novel should provide fresh insight. Readers, therefore, must be helped to develop flexibility of mind, a freedom from rigid emotional habits, if they are to enter the aesthetic experiences the artist has made possible." (98)

Rosenblatt does a decent job of capturing the upheaval of the adolescent mind--changing body images and obsessive self-consciousness, a desire to reflect what's "normal (and here I suggest more attention to media awareness in our curriculum is needed)," struggling to find independence and emancipation from familial structures. They need links to their experiences to be present in the books they read. They need to be emotionally and intellectually ready to reevaluate assumptions and cultural suggestions, and to adjust accordingly. This is how readers live in the world.

Easy to see why fundies are so scared.

I return to my question about whether or not some books may be universally accessible. I feel like Rosenblatt's saying yes. But not without a lot of trickiness.