ABSTRACT
In Literature as Exploration, Louise M. Rosenblatt describes one of the aims of her reader-response approach to literature in the following manner:
One can have no quarrel with the fact that the attitudes and ideas the reader brings to literature are the results of his past experience. Our concern is rather that if the student’s superstructure of ideas is built on too narrow a base, he should be helped to gain broader and deeper insight through literature itself. That is why our emphasis has been on the interaction between the reader and the literary work. When the reader becomes aware of the dynamic nature of that interaction, he may gain some critical consciousness of the strength or weaknesses of the emotional and intellectual equipment with which he approaches literature (and life). Since we interpret the book or poem in terms of our fund of past experiences, it is equally possible and necessary that we come to reinterpret our old sense of things in the light of the new ways of thinking and feeling offered by the work of art. Only when this happens has there been a full interplay between book and reader, and hence a complete and rewarding literary experience. (126)
