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Abstract

Reading »Normal«: A Critique of Rosenblatt’s Reader-Response Theory In the article we address the question of how the relation between literary theory and literary didactics should be understood. During the last decades the new research field of subject didactics has been introduced as a bridge between pedagogy and traditional academic disciplines. As the metaphoric bridge implies, didactics could be seen as a meeting place for different theoretical traditions. In the article we argue that this kind of meeting should not be reduced to simple eclecticism; just adding one entity to the other. Instead the meeting ground should be made a place of real critical investigation of the presuppositions and consequences of different theoretical approaches across traditional borders. Swedish research on literary reading in school relies heavily on the reader-response theory formulated by among others Louise M. Rosenblatt. This theory has the merit of having transformed the study of literature from a positivist reliance on facts and cultural heritage to a more dynamic and interpretive view on reading. Nonetheless it also, as all theories, has its blind spots with consequences that have to be critically examined. Through a reading of Rosenblatt’s major works, particularly Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem, we therefore investigate the theoretical foundations of the theory. What we find is an insistence on the individual reader as the fundamental and stabilizing centre of language, and hence also of reading. This rejection of language as structure is based on an understanding of culture as the context that forms the individual, which can be pragmatically set aside when it comes to the unique encounter between reader and text. Reading can thus be seen as centred on the individual experience of the reader, an experience that becomes the only criterion for the understanding of normal reading. Rosenblatt’s theory leaves no room for a critical analysis of how the normal reading is constituted discursively or for an understanding of literary works that questions aesthetics based on individual experiences. It therefore tends to reproduce established norms and normal ways of reading. Consequently one may ask what kind of literature it actually supports the reading of.

Keywords

• Rosenblatt
• reader-response theory
• didactics
• literary theory
• reading