An Ethical Ideal? Louise Rosenblatt and Democracy—A Personalist Reconsideration

Abstract

Louise Rosenblatt’s theory of literary experience was a landmark in twentieth-century contributions to aesthetics, pedagogy, and literary theory. Her work is consistently studied, although critical re-evaluations have waned in the past ten years or so. This essay turns to Rosenblatt’s political commitment to democracy and argues that in her writing, her politics are in conflict with her more personalist sympathies concerning the value of the human being. I draw on the philosophy of personalism to show how Rosenblatt’s writing on imagination offers a more congenial framework for thinking about building harmonious human relations.

Keywords

• Louise Rosenblatt
• personalism
• democracy
• phantasm
• Berdyaev
• ethics
• literary imagination
• Maxine Greene