Louise Rosenblatt looked at reading as a transaction between the reader and the text. Because there are million of readers all with an individual experience, there are potentially millions of individual works. Texts remains abstract symbols until the reader transforms them into meaning. The reader then draws on past experience "to shape the new experience on the page." The reader and the text then under go a tug of war each being effected by the reader's experience and what the text has to offer and ultimately creating new meaning individualized to and originating in the reader. This is why a text can have different effects on us at different times in our lives and why the meaning of the text will be dependent on the reader's experiences. Without a sure understanding of the reader and his experiences, one would not know how the text would effect him.
Reading = awe
Rosenblatt also explains that because of this relationship, readers will turn to literature for personal satisfaction. When I read the chapter cited below, I highlighted and starred this sentence specifically in relation to our class studying awe: "[Literature] places them outside us, enables us to see them with a certain detachment and to understand our own situation and motivation more objectively." This reminds me of the idea that awe brings us to a new level of understanding. Rosenblatt was specifically looking at how literature helps us work through problems, but doesn't awe have the same effect of expanding our understanding in the same way? She refers to it as a "value of escape" and an "enlargement of experience." I also like when she states, "It enables us to exercise our sense more intensely and more fully." It is through this experience and new transaction that we have with the text that creates a change within us. To me, this explains why I think that everything literary can be looked at as awe. If we look at reading as this relationship that expands our minds and creates an escape and experience, then there is backing for us to not be able to name works that don't evoke awe because everything is evoking awe through this relationship. But we specifically have to look at literature as "not so much additional information as additional experience." Because is awe not an experience that would be described very similar to this experience of reading? Then experience of reading and the experience of awe would equate?
So what for us?
I think that this is an interesting take to approach things (and perhaps I am stretching the definition of awe too far) but I think that this would be an lens for most everyone to consider. Everyone could look at how awe seems to be an innate part of the experience. (ie [and sorry for any generalizations] +Paul Bills can you equate the experience felt with reading to that with video games?, +Shelly Jebe this would help explain the constructed awe of Austenites, +Cara Gillespie memoirs are describing experiences but also creating experiences thus creating the cycle as I discuss in relation to mine below, +Greg Bayles perhaps cheap awe is not really creating this experience and then that explains why people don't read-- now we aren't conflicting [as per library conversation]!)
I think that things start to get a little hazy and break down when you start equating reading with awe and we get back to the confusion and vague convolutedness (sorry perhaps I am not helping). But I don't think that it is something that we can just ignore and say that there is no awe in things it we can look at the experience itself as awe.
As for my own project, this supports why reading makes readers. It is the experience itself. And readers keep turning back to books for that experience because it creates a last impression and effect on the reader.
Works Cited
Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The
Literary Experience.” Literature as
Exploration. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995. Web.
19 Jan 2014.
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