ABSTRACT
In laying out her transactional theory of reading literature, Rosenblatt makes a distinction between an interaction and a transaction. Whereas an interaction model presupposes “separate, self-contained, and already different entities acting on one another,” a transactional view entails “an ongoing process in which the elements or factors are… aspects of a total situation, each conditioned by and conditioning the other” (1978, p. 17). In this intersubjective process, the experiences, emotions, and attitudes of individual readers fuse with a text to evoke a “poem,” what Rosenblatt defi nes as “an event in time…not an object or ideal entity [but] a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text” (p. 12). The idea of a literary transaction, where “the reader’s creation of a poem out of text must be an active, self-ordering and self-corrective process” (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 11), opened a pathway where a proliferation of meanings, rather than single or fi xed meanings, could become a standard approach to literary interpretation or textual response.
