Deconstructing “Aesthetic Response” in Small-Group Discussions about Literature: A Possible Solution to the “Aesthetic Response” Dilemma

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E n g l i s h E d u c a t i o n , V 4 2 N 2 , J a n u a r y 2 0 1 0

E n g l i s h E d u c a t i o n , J a n u a r y 2 0 1 0

Anna O. Soter, Ian A. G. Wilkinson, Sean P. Connors, P. Karen Murphy, and Vincent Fu-Yuan Shen

Deconstructing “Aesthetic Response” in Small-Group Discussions about Literature: A Possible Solution to the “Aesthetic Response” Dilemma

In conducting a federally funded study on the role of small-group discussions as possible mechanisms for the development of high-level

comprehension (Soter et al., 2008; Wilkinson, Soter, & Murphy, 2007), we conducted an exhaustive narrative analysis of over 300 scholarly products, including empirical research, conceptual and theoretical scholarship, and instructional applications, to identify parameters of productive small-group discussions. These parameters included stance toward literary texts, of which two were Rosenblatt’s (1978) aesthetic and efferent stances. We also conducted an intensive analysis of classroom discussions about and around literary text, from transcripts provided by the proponents of nine recognized small-group discussion approaches.

Through our study of classroom talk about and around literary text, we discovered that our application of Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995, 1978) “aesthetic” stance to elementary (primarily Grades 4–6) students’ affective responses to literary text uniformly lacked the simultaneous articulation of “the real impact between the book and the mind of the reader” (p. 72), that is, what Rosenblatt (1978) and Bogdan (1992) had in mind when they conceptualized “aesthetic” response. Our solution was to search for a descriptor that would adequately capture what we saw in these responses, that is, responses that were indeed affective (personal, emotional) and experiential. We found that Jakobson’s (1987) expressive function of language could more appropriately and consistently describe such responses. We are aware that the concept “expressive” carries with it some sizable baggage related to how it has been used and perceived in the domain of writing instruction (most notably promoted by Elbow, 1973).

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S o t e r e t a l . > D e c o n s t r u c t i n g “ A e s t h e t i c R e s p o n s e ”

This article, then, focuses on a conceptual discussion that provides an argument for utilizing what we have termed “expressive response” to ac-count for readers’ personal connections to the texts they have read in terms of “memories and free associations” (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 151). This then leads to an exploration of the possibility of a third stance that can account for the kinds of responses that any reader might make at different times and for different reasons as well as Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995, 1978) aesthetic response. The descriptor “aesthetic response” may have been asked to do work for which it was never intended.

A Hypothetical Vignette: Responding to a Literary Text

In two hypothetical classrooms, one a ninth-grade classroom, the other a fifth-grade classroom, students discuss literary texts they have read in small-group, literature-circle style. They’re used to each other, the small-group format, and expressing their personal connections to texts they are reading. Discussion in both groups is quite lively. The fifth graders have just finished reading Katherine Paterson’s (1977) A Bridge to Terabithia, where Leslie shares with Jess why Janice Avery, one of their classmates, has been crying. Two of Janice’s so-called friends had revealed that Janice’s father beats her badly. Jess observes that “you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school” (p. 75). The big question they were to discuss is, “Why do you think Janice blabbed to her friends about her dad?” One student says, thoughtfully,

When my dad beats me, I don’t want anyone to know. He beats me every day. It’s awful, but I wouldn’t tell no one.

Another responds,

I felt so bad for her when I read that she’s beaten up all the time, but she shudda kept her mouth shut. You don’t know what your dad might do if he heard about her blabbing.

The students continue to discuss their responses to the situation, relating their experiences of others as evidence of why Janice should or should not tell her classmates. They reason, argue, and provide personal experiences. They refer to the text: “Well, like the book says on page 74, ‘It’s a very com-plicated situation.’” Another says,

Yes, she musta had felt left out and maybe she thought she’d get, um . . . some sympathy . . . like where Leslie says on page 74 that she understands why Janice didn’t get on with people.

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In the other class, the ninth graders are discussing Paterson’s (1980) Jacob Have I Loved. Their teacher favors using personal response to make deeper connections with the texts. She encourages students to probe their responses, to think about the text, including its style, which may have triggered their response. Students discuss Call’s revelation that he and Caroline are to be married. Their focus is on Louise’s response and connecting that to her perceived history of always having lost out to her sister. One student mutters:

Just like me and Miranda! Things always fall into place for her. Not me! Oh no! But wow . . . the author just blew me away when she got me right into Louise’s interior. . . . Oh, I felt the room spin myself! And how she had Louise stagger. I could just see the whole thing as if I was right in there with her.

Another says:

Can’t you just feel the lemon at the edges of your tongue when she has Lou say “I guess it took you most of the train trip from New York to work that one out.” Soooooo biting! And then, and then, I thought just what she thought when Call wimpily says that Caroline’s “alone in that world.” Grief, what a wimp! But wow too—the writer just draws you in so it’s as if you’re one of them and then all the things that’ve happened to you in your own life, sort of come up like ghosts to haunt you . . . like times when you felt just like Louise.

The hypothetical personal response to a section of A Bridge to Tera-bithia is typical of what we have seen in the published literature on small-group discussions. The hypothetical response to Jacob Have I Loved is less commonly reported as evidence of Rosenblatt’s aesthetic response. Both exemplify the problem of the conflation of the personal (self-referential) and aesthetic connections made in the enthusiasm to embrace the possibility of the personal response in the context of classroom literature instruction. The hypothetical fifth-grade responses suggest strong empathetic connec-tions with the text and, therefore, typically involve the inclusion of parallel personal experiences and feelings elicited by the text. However, the personal responses of relatively unsophisticated readers (in terms of age and experi-ence) do not typically include reference to elements of the text in ways that reveal awareness by these readers of how those elements may have influ-enced their responses. They are not yet connoisseurs of reading, let alone literary reading; that is, few have a sense of the qualities of the text that play on their perception of the experiences portrayed that are as significant as the content of the events themselves. They are experiencers of the text but relatively unaware of what is playing into that experience.

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In contrast, the hypothetical ninth-grade students portray some mea-sure of what Rosenblatt (1938/1995) intended teachers to understand in her insistence that an “aesthetic response” must entail a

free, uninhibited emotional reaction to a work of art or literature as an absolutely necessary condition of sound literary judgment. However, it is not, to use the logician’s term, a sufficient condition. Without a real impact between the book and the mind of the reader, there can be no process of judgment at all, but honest recognition of one’s own reaction is not in itself sufficient to ensure sound critical opinion. (p. 72; emphasis in original)

The ninth-grade responses are as uninhibitedly personal (and paral-lel) as those of the fifth graders, but there the similarity ends. They also articulate that necessary textual connection that would enable, for example, an ice-cream connoisseur to distinguish between one brand of vanilla ice cream and another—texture, flavor, more or less of something that Rosenblatt would argue is “in” the text itself. Therefore, she argues, “The transactional view, while insisting on the importance of the reader’s contribution, does not discount the text and accepts a concern for validity of interpretation” (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 151).

The Appeal of the “Aesthetic” Response Descriptor

Along with many other teachers and scholars during the past three decades, we have also found Rosenblatt’s stances (the aesthetic in particular) to be a significant breakthrough as legitimate responses to literary texts in K–12 and even some college classrooms. Unlike Richards (1929), who was deeply troubled by what he saw as unexplored ignorance of textual history and conventions in his students’ interpretations of their literary reading, Rosen-blatt (1978 in particular) allows us to embrace what readers brought to their experiencing of the literature being read. The Reader, The Text, The Poem appeared as researchers in the field of reading (e.g., Rumelhart, 1981) were offering, for example, schema theory as an explanation of why individual (and, ultimately, collective) interpretations of reading could vary signifi-cantly. The soil was fertile for extending the implications of schema theory to justify a significant role for individual, personal responses to texts. By the mid-1980s, Rosenblatt’s (1978) transactional theory of readers’ responses to literary text had become the primary explanatory theory for considering readers’ affective engagement with literary texts and a primary justification for taking such responses seriously.

The authors of this article, likewise, accepted Rosenblatt’s (1978) aesthetic response as providing an adequate explanation for the nature of

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affective engagement in literary reading. Nevertheless, anyone who has fol-lowed various debates on the adequacy of Rosenblatt’s definition of “aesthetic response” and her defense of aesthetic and efferent stances toward literary text knows that considerable disquiet arose by the mid-1990s about the ways in which researchers and teachers interpreted and applied these stances. Indeed, Rosenblatt (1985, 1993, 1995, 2003) sought, in several publications, to clarify her intentions regarding use of these concepts and choice of no-menclature. Among her most earnest and well-intentioned critics, Purves (1988), Faust (2000), Lewis (2000), and Dressman and Webster (2003) sought to unpack the problem of an implied continuum in the aesthetic-efferent distinction, and also argued that Rosenblatt was more text-oriented than many teachers thought she was. Nevertheless, necessary and valuable as this reinterpretation of Rosenblatt’s (1978) most well-known and frequently applied aspect of her transactional theory of response has been, a viable and additional alternative to “aesthetic” response has not, to our knowledge, been proposed. Some fine-tuning of the way in which we have described students’ non-efferent responses (i.e., typically termed “aesthetic responses” in the published literature) is warranted and timely. The aesthetic-efferent distinction has proven to be problematic because it does not account for a range in non-efferent responses in relation to literary reading. Describ-ing these responses as “expressive” may allow us to honor the commonly expressed, highly subjective responses as valid and appropriate and assign the descriptor “aesthetic response” to the kinds of responses we believe Rosenblatt (1938/1995; 1978) had in mind when she articulated the concept and continued to defend it.

A Brief Account of the Enduring “Aesthetic” Response Dilemma

In contributing to the evolution of the still-viable reader response theory in the secondary English classroom since the 1980s, scholars have built on a momentum that began not with the still-current and often-cited publication of Rosenblatt’s (1978) The Reader, The Text, The Poem, but with the adop-tion of her work by others in K–12 literacy education—most notably Purves and Rippere (1968), Squire (1964), Applebee (1978), and Probst (1988)—who popularized reader response theory and who foregrounded the concept of aesthetic response Rosenblatt (1938/1995) had developed in her earlier work, Literature as Exploration. This radical shift away from the heavily text-based focus of traditional criticism, articulated most clearly in New Criticism and other formalist approaches to reading, ushered in an era in school-based literature instruction that embraced young readers’ personal connections

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to literary texts as a significant factor in the literary reading enterprise and foregrounded the active (and necessary) role of the reader. However, Squire (1985) challenges this quest to honor students’ engagement with literary text at the expense of the text, noting that nothing in Rosenblatt (1978), Probst (1984) or others’ contributions on “response to literature” advocated “ignor-ing” the quality of the literary work in eliciting response” (p. 19).

Appropriating Rosenblatt’s (1978) concept of “aesthetic response” to account for the personal connections that readers make to literary texts was, and still is, not without difficulties, one of which is the enduring de-bate regarding the nature and qualities of response. Personal engagement is evident in the following example:

I felt sad when he said “I have something to say to you: Goodbye.” I felt sad when he had to move back and forth.

What we don’t know is whether the student who uttered this response was conscious of some element in the text that triggered his or her sadness, since that awareness is not included in the response. It appears that the response focuses on the reader’s feelings, which may or may not be unique and which may or may not be shared by the character implied in the “he” reference in the response. This kind of response has been commonly held as an example of a Rosenblattian (1978) aesthetic response in the published research.

The Case for Adding “Expressive Response”

In light of the conundrum surrounding the nature of aesthetic response, and given our desire to make a case for the role and value of personal con-nections to the literature that is read in K–12 literacy/literary education, we propose adding the descriptor “expressive response” to remove from our work the enduring and unresolved struggle to define the term “aesthetic,” while at the same time providing a potentially meaningful and recogniz-able way of evaluating students’ emotional engagement with texts as well as accounting for responses that live up to Rosenblatt’s intention in her use of “aesthetic response.”

The additional descriptor—expressive response—is derived from Ja-kobson’s (1987) functions of language. Jakobson defines the “expressive” or “emotive” function of language as that which is focused on the speaker, and in which the speaker utters a “direct expression of his or her attitude toward what he or she is speaking about. It tends to produce an impression of a certain emotion whether true or feigned . . . the emotive function . . . flavors to some extent, all our utterances (hence it is not absent when another

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function may be primary)” (p. 44). Adopting the term “expressive” removes a troubling feature that literacy educators face when they use Rosenblatt’s descriptor, aesthetic response, to refer to the personal (whether emotional or experiential) connections that readers make to literary texts—unlike the latter, expressive response does not entail a need for readers to reflect on the role that the text plays in shaping their response, a point on which Rosenblatt (1938/1995, 1978) insisted.

Scope of the Expressive Response

In Literature as Exploration, Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995) perspective on younger readers is clearly developmental, although responding to literature self-referentially, a notion accommodated by the “expressive” function as defined by Jakobson (1987) and Britton (1970, 1971), seems natural to even the most analytical and sophisticated of readers at whatever age. The follow-ing expressive examples are drawn from written responses made by college seniors in a Young Adult Literature course:

“I was so moved . . . it’s a book you can’t put down.”

“Charlotte Doyle makes me remember that time when I was a little girl.”

“I was instantly bonded with Phillip as I found out he was a track runner. I am a track runner.”

“I really would have liked Lyddie to end up with Luke Stevens so she would have someone there for her.”

At the same time, reading in school contexts embraces a notion of devel-opment and assumes a continuum of learning as a goal. Thus, Rosenblatt (1938/1995) argued, personal responses to literature are not only valid but also essential to enable the movement toward a transaction between the reader and the text in such a way that the reader eventually demonstrates literary sensibility, or what Rosenblatt termed “sensitivity to techniques of literature” (p. 50). In practice, in a discussion involving a literary text, students might move in and out of self-referential response toward an ac-knowledgment of the role of the text in the elicitation of such self-referential experiences. The following excerpt illustrates this movement quite well:

I was seduced by his [Cormier’s The Bumblebee Flies Anyway] attention to detail . . . like freshwater fish bated by its captor, I was teased and tantalized, then yanked into the story’s element of suspense. (qtd. in Soter, 1999, p. 109)

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Although the term “expressive” carries with it a free-for-all, anything-goes-approach to writing instruction, it nevertheless has utility and is appropriate for English language arts teachers in providing another helpful descriptor for our work. It has utility because it indeed is self-referential in function, and in this sense it allows for the inclusion of references to personal experi-ences that parallel those in the text (e.g., “I had a brother who looked after me too”), as well as affective (i.e., emotional) responses to the text that are similarly self-referential (e.g., “I was sad when Joey died because it reminded me of the time my best friend died”).

For these reasons, we are not propos-ing that we replace “aesthetic” response with “expressive”; rather, there is a need to expand the range of responses, thus enabling teachers to identify and honor all the responses that readers make (whatever their age, orientation, or experience as readers) with respect to literary text. This argument is supported by Rosenblatt’s (1978) struggle to resolve the reader’s “absorption” in the experiencing of a text: “The aesthetically-driven reader . . . must decipher the images or concepts or assertions that the words point to, he also pays attention to the associations, feelings, attitudes and ideas that these words and their referents arouse in him” (p. 27). As Rosenblatt stated, “The aesthetic stance should not be confused with free association or a simple reverie . . . the concept of transaction emphasizes the relationship with, and continuing awareness of the text . . . during the literary experi-ence, concentration on the words of the text is perhaps even more keen than in an efferent reading . . . the aesthetic stance heightens awareness of the words as signs with particular visual and auditory characteristics and as symbols” (p. 29).

Expressive vs. Aesthetic Responses

In our small-group discussion project, we were challenged to find examples of what would constitute this view of an aesthetic response—an interesting dilemma in itself. Examples of what have been described as “aesthetic” responses, but which we have reidentified as “expressive” responses, are illustrated in Figure 1. These have been drawn from published articles on the value of small-group discussions as a context for promoting students’ en-gagement with literary texts. Publication years but no additional identifiers for these articles have been provided. Our intent in using these examples is

Although the term “expressive” carries with it a free-for-all, anything-goes-approach to writing instruction, it nevertheless has utility and is appro-priate for English language arts teachers in providing another helpful descriptor for our work.

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purely illustrative and demonstrative of the confusion we have experienced as literature and literacy researchers since reader response and its most often-cited proponent, Rosenblatt (1978), emerged in the field of reading.

While examples of the types of response, which we argue are illus-trative of “expressive” response, are common, even quite prolific, parallel examples in the published literature of the kind of “aesthetic” response as defined by Rosenblatt have proved to be more elusive. Several examples (see Figure 2) were drawn from a previous publication by one of the authors of this article, as examples of what Bogdan (1992) presents as the “simultane-ous perception and experience of the total form of the literary work, how-ever fleeting that glimpse might be” (p. 113). Bogdan (1992) comes closest to identifying that mysterious union of mind and emotion, apprehension

Figure 1. Examples of Student Talk Illustrative of Expressive Connections to Text from Studies Published between 1989 and 2000

1989

1992

1993

1994

1996

1997

1999

2000

S1: My dog is just like them . . . just lays over there.S2: Oh, that’s sad.S3: Does it ever eat?S1: Oh it eats sometimes . . . just lays over there.

S1: My brother Bill hurts my brother Matthew and Matthew gets allthe blame every single time.S2: Once I saw a cartoon like “Tom and Jerry” and Tom, the cat, always gets his nose right off.S3: It’s not really funny to get a bee sting.

S1: She didn’t like the grandpa dying.S1: Oh . . . the dog dying . . . S2: Fine, I had three dogs that died so it was OK. S3: I had two.

S: It was sad all those people dead or in hospital. Why can’t people talk instead of wars, fights, and bombs? If everyone was nice to each other, everything would be alright.

S: It reminded me of when I came home happy and I got out of the truck withTrend and my sister told me Grandma passed away. I remember when I wentto her room. I was real uncomfortable sitting and talking when she died onthe bed. I was in Houston and didn’t want to leave Grandma.

S: It was like I’ll Fix Anthony. I’ll fix my sister too. She always thinks she’s the boss, so I’ll fix (her). (name of sister).

S: I felt sad when he said “I have something to say to you: ‘Goodbye.’”I felt sad when he had to move back and forth.

S: Imagine it was your birthday and you went to the movies and someone brought you a rabbit that was a vampire, what would you have done if you had seen a vampire?

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and comprehension of the literary work that underscores what Rosenblatt (1938/1995) attempts to capture in her description of this kind of response as “aesthetic.” In Bogdan’s account, such a response (“stasis”) “resides in the instinctual and instantaneous apprehension of and union with the art object in terms of its imaginative and emotional impact” (p. 113).

The notion of the aesthetic as it is conceived by Ingarden (1973), whose work Rosenblatt (1978) cites in The Reader, The Text, The Poem, is also help-ful here and serves to more fully illuminate her thinking. Like Rosenblatt, Ingarden (1973) insists on the need to acknowledge the role that the literary text plays in shaping the aesthetic experience. He suggests that the onset of aesthetic experience is signaled by the “original emotion,” that is, “an excitement resulting from that quality which struck us or forced itself upon us in the perceived object” (p. 189). The original emotion is sated, Ingarden argues, only when the percipient reflects on the quality or property that precipitated it:

After the phase of the emotion, which dominates us for a moment, follows the return to the quality which aroused us. Although the apprehension of it takes place in some cases on the basis of the earlier perception, the previ-ously described modification of this perception has the result, above all, that the relevant quality now steps into the foreground and is apprehended much more distinctly and in greater fullness than in its first appearance (p. 197; emphasis added)

Rosenblatt’s (1978) view of the aesthetic—which emphasizes a need for readers to acknowledge the literary text as a coparticipant in the literary

Figure 2. Examples of Talk Illustrative of Aesthetic Connections to Text

Lois Lowry’s The Giver is a truly rare literary find; an entertaining, thought-provoking book that you can’t put down and don’t want to end.

It was Mary Call who grabbed me by the neck and yanked me into the book [Where the Lillies Bloom]. As with most books in its category, the book lived beyond its 210th page.

I was seduced by his [Cormier’s The Bumblebee Flies Anyway] attention to detail . . . like freshwater fish bated by its captor, I was tease and tantalized, then yanked into the story’s element of suspense.

I was so caught up in it [ Jacob Have I Loved] that I just wanted to continue reading it with-out interruption. I was so moved by the novel that the images did not leave me quickly, and I was genuinely shocked when others who had read the work thought Louise was a whiner.

I loved the book [ Jacob Have I Loved] and would read it again. Why I loved it is a difficult question to answer.

Note: Examples drawn from Soter (1999).

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transaction—is not consistent with the notion of response that has dominated the field of literacy instruction today, one that has emphasized personal response without placing a corresponding emphasis on the literary text. Again, we believe that adding the term “expressive response” overcomes this dilemma. Doing so allows a conceptualization of the “aesthetic” and “expressive” responses in the following ways—the former including the literary work or text as a co-subject of attention, the latter focusing more on the personal connections and associations that a text inspires. Figure 3 rep-resents a composite of features that we would expect to find in an “aesthetic response” and in an “expressive response.”

The features of aesthetic response represented in Figure 3 are based on Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995, 1978, 2003) delineations as well as arguments set forth by other scholars (Abrams, 1979; Bleich, 1978; Ingarden, 1973; Iser, 1978; Jakobson, 1987; Jauss, 1982). Conversely, the features of expressive response are based on the work of Jakobson (1960, 1987), Elbow (1973), and Britton (1970, 1971). It is worth noting that Britton’s use of the term “expressive” relates to his theory of language functions, which he conceptualized as being “based on a continuum of language roles” (Pinnell & Jagar, 2003, p. 897), identifiable through different phases of the child’s language development, including the participant and spectator roles. The spectator role involves us-ing “language to daydream, chat about experiences, contemplate events, tell stories, and preserve delight in utterance” (p. 897). Britton based his three major functions of language (transactional, expressive, and poetic) on the work of functional linguists (e.g., Halliday, 1969, 1978). For our purposes, it is useful to note the synergistic emergence of a linguistic function (i.e., the

Figure 3. Distinguishing Features of an Aesthetic and an Expressive Response to Literature

Primary Features of an Aesthetic Response to Literature

• Asenseoftheworkaswellasone’sresponsetoit

• Anappreciationofthecraftofthework

• Interactionbetweentheperceivedandtheperceiver

• Engagementwiththework

Primary Features of an Expressive Response to Literature

• Theworksparksapersonalconnectionormemory

• Personalexperienceparallelsortakesofffromtheconnection

• Theresponseisprimarilyintermsofcontent,asopposedtoform,orevenamixofcontent and form

• Engagementwiththeworkis“translated”intopersonalexperience

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expressive function) that appeared in literary study at approximately the same time it appeared in the context of describing the language develop-ment of children.

Using the “expressive” function, which emphasizes the individual’s articulation of how she or he experiences and responds to life in general, to capture the individual’s personal connections to literary text seems to us a natural expansion of its role. The children’s responses in Figure 1 were drawn from publications that identified those responses as examples of Rosen-blatt’s aesthetic response. While we agree that these responses take place “in response to” the texts students were discussing, we suggest that they do not reflect Rosenblatt’s notion of a “transaction” between reader and text so much as they reflect the reader’s means of “exchanging opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences” (Pinnell & Jagar, 2003, p. 897). Significantly, these excerpts illustrate the value of such exchanges, a value that is undermined if they are considered unsatisfactory examples of aesthetic response. That is, in the absence of the term “expressive” response, there is no adequate way of categorizing these responses in a manner that identifies the important role they play in demonstrating student learning and student engagement in response to literary reading.

Rosenblatt’s “Aesthetic Response” and “Reader-Plus-Text-Oriented Theories”

As many in the field of literature instruction know, Rosenblatt (1985, 1993, 1994, 1995, 2003) sought to clarify her use of the term “aesthetic response” in several publications and insisted that the distinctions scholars made between her efferent/aesthetic stances were literal and narrowly conceived. Her primary clarification—specifically, that it would be more useful to consider “the terms ‘efferent’ and ‘aesthetic’” as “referring to a continuum of ‘mixes’ of different proportions that range from predominantly public (efferent) to predominantly private (aesthetic)” (Rosenblatt, 1995, p.350)—was not suc-cessful in quelling the ongoing debate as to what is aesthetic and what is efferent response in reading (see, for example, Dressman & Webster, 2003; Faust, 2000; Lewis, 2000).

In a more recent explication of her concept of aesthetic response, Rosenblatt (2003) locates her transactional theory of reading in a category that, to the best of our knowledge, had not previously been articulated: Reader-Plus-Text-Oriented Theories (p. 70). In doing so, she distinguishes between reader- and text-oriented theories of reader response theory. Among the reader response theories Rosenblatt locates in “Reader-Plus-Text-Oriented

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Theories” are reception theory (e.g., Iser, Jauss, Mailloux) and her transac-tional theory. Significantly, she “rejects” the “reader response label” on the grounds that it is “too often interpreted simply as a critical approach with personal response as its end product” (p. 70). This, perhaps, was the price unwittingly paid by having been mostly “read with an eye to pedagogical implication” (Purves, 1988) and because she held a position in education where such an implication is usually drawn. Unlike Richards (1929), whose concern was that his students’ responses are evidence of failure to read and judge poetry in ways appropriate to the university setting, Rosenblatt (1938/1995) is marginally concerned with possible pedagogical implications in delineating her position on literary texts and readers. Rather, her focus is not on students per se but on “human concerns” with literary texts in general, influenced as she was by the “philosophers and anthropologists” she encountered while pursuing an undergraduate degree (Purves, 1988, p. 66).

Although Rosenblatt (2003) insists that her transactional theory cap-tures the relationship between reader, transaction, and text, and although she concedes that there is no single correct interpretation of the text, she nevertheless maintains that some “interpretations are better and have more ‘warranted assertibility’ than others” (p. 71). As such, her Reader-Plus-Text-Oriented response theories reflect Blau’s (1993) goal of creating

reading groups that respond to literary texts in ways that are “intellectually responsible” and that embrace the notion that all readers have something potentially useful and interesting to offer to collective understanding and apprecia-tion of such texts (p. 10).

Much of the ongoing confusion surround-ing the notion of “aesthetic response” seems to be a result of a tendency on the part of literacy educators to use the term to refer to the personal, affectively based experiencing of literary texts

by young, relatively inexperienced readers. Such usage is not, in our view, consistent with the manner in which Rosenblatt (1938/1995, 1978) conceived of the term. Lewis’s (2000) assertion that we have “conflated the personal and the aesthetic” (p. 255) speaks directly to the heart of the issue. Lewis argues for a “broader view of what pleasurable aesthetic reading can mean” through reading that “addresses the social and political dimensions of texts” (p. 264), a position with which we heartily concur.

Again, introducing “expressive response” risks the baggage that the term “expressive” carries, linked as it has been to Elbow’s (1973) quest to

Much of the ongoing confu-sion surrounding the notion of “aesthetic response” seems to be a result of a tendency on the part of literacy educators to use

the term to refer to the personal, affectively based experiencing of literary texts by young, relatively

inexperienced readers.

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democratize the writing classroom, which at times has been perceived as a free-for-all. A similar democratization of the literature classroom has been equated with reader response theories (Probst, 2003), particularly those that emphasize the role of personal connections with texts (whether one produces them in the writing classroom or their re-construction in the literature classroom). Nevertheless, “expressive response” can account for the kinds of personal responses many of us have observed in the literature classroom. Its appropriation by literacy educators offers a potential solution to the conundrum that Rosenblatt’s “aesthetic” response poses.

“Expressive” vs. “Aesthetic Response” in K–12 Literacy Education

In the context of K–12 students’ engagement with literary texts, “aesthetic response” has been understood to refer to the experiential connection manifested in student talk or student response journals. Yet theoretical pronouncements concerning aesthetic response and aesthetic reading, in-cluding some made by Rosenblatt (1978) herself, have come from thinkers who worked with early or advanced college students or who had the luxury of theorizing about aesthetics, aesthetic response, and aesthetic reading having taught only graduate students or no students at all. Significantly, no theorist seems to have derived the notion of an “aesthetic reading” or an “aesthetic response” by observing literary reading in the context of compul-sory education—that is, in the K–12 setting. That we have adopted, without major modification, these concepts (and terms) for the K–12 setting is also, therefore, problematic for several reasons:

> First, in appropriating the term “aesthetic response” and the con-cept behind it, we have moved it from a context of reading for per-sonal pleasure and edification to one in which reading is not only required but also assessed according to perceived norms of desirable performance. Granted, students are able to enter the world of a book and engage with it deeply in the context of a classroom. Neverthe-less, as Applebee (1974), Purves and Pradl (2003), Langer (1998), and others have observed, the primary motive for reading in schools usu-ally has little to do with aesthetics. Instead, it stems from a desire to extract information about reading as a performance related to decoding, comprehension, and, possibly, critical thinking.

> Second, as we know from research on reading performance (Al-lington & Johnston, 2002; Taylor, Pearson, Garcia, Stahl, & Bauer,

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2006), if readers are not sufficiently proficient to enable them to move beyond the “mechanics” of navigating the words on the page, they are not in a position to move to a level of interaction with the text that enables them to enter into that world in such a way as to engage aesthetically.

> Third, Rosenblatt (1938/1995) does not conceptualize aesthetic response in relation to an audience of younger readers. Instead, she expects younger readers “to grow into the emotional and intellec-tual and aesthetic maturity necessary for appreciating great works of literature” (p. 276).

It would appear, then, that we have appropriated a term that was intended to describe a particular way of connecting with literary text, and applied it to a population for which it was neither conceptualized nor intended.

With regard to the aesthetic/efferent distinction many of us have made based on readings of Rosenblatt’s work, Purves (1988) suggests (and we believe that Rosenblatt would concur) that the two stances represent “dispositions” that readers assume in relation to texts—that is, readers “make choices” (p. 70), often at an unconscious level, regarding the stance they will allow to color their reading. In the context of schooling, doing so is problematic—readers have historically had little (if any) say over the stance they take toward literary texts. Instead, pedagogical and assessment practices have often necessitated their adopting an efferent stance. Yet as literature discussion groups (e.g., Book Club, Literature Circles, Grand Conversations) have grown increasingly popular in reading and language arts classrooms, many educators have attempted to encourage an “aesthetic” stance in a va-riety of ways—e.g., open-ended questions that do not assume a pre-ordained answer (Eeds & Wells, 1989), sharing the “floor” with students so that they are encouraged to expand on their responses to texts (McMahon, Raphael, & Goatley, 1995), using reflective responses to literature in writing portfolios (Rogers, 1997), illustrating one’s response to literary text (Soter, 1993), or using dramatic interpretation (Kelly, 1992).

Inspired by researchers who examined student response to (and en-gagement with) literary texts (e.g., Applebee, 1978; Faust, Cockrill, Hancock, & Issertstedt, 2005; Gambell, 1993; Purves & Rippere, 1968), and endeavoring to develop student-centered approaches to literature instruction, literacy educators appropriated the term “aesthetic” to describe responses in which students related events and characters they read about to incidents and people in their own lives. Such experiential connections to literature were presumed to “hook” readers to texts, thereby generating a new enthusiasm

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for reading literature that many in the field saw as rich ground for fostering more engaged and cognitively deeper reading.

The Problem of Defining “Aesthetic” and “Aesthetic Response”

According to Graesser, Person, & Johnston (1996), scholars face several obstacles in their efforts to identify the nature of the aesthetic experience involved in reading literary texts. They argue, for example, that there is no essence to the quality of aesthetic objects and to aesthetic experiences, the result of which makes it possible for readers to respond to aspects of litera-ture—novelty, literary devices, prototypical plots, good form, unity in the text, psychologically rich themes and content, and so forth. They conclude that “aesthetic quality is clearly a complex, multi-faceted construct” and are not surprised to learn “that scholars have been unable to identify any single essence of aesthetic experience and encountered widespread disagreement as to the meaning of aesthetic quality” (p. 9).

Graesser et al. (1996) also suggest that it is “difficult to consciously identify and articulate the components of aesthetic experience as noted in a simple study of what is defined as ‘literary—i.e., good art’” (p. 10). To support this claim, they provide data from their study in which “15–20% of two groups each of 20 college students characterized [good art] as abstract, unique, unpredictable, accepted universally; 20–25% characterized it as pleasing to the senses, realistic; 13%–30% characterized it as interesting, entertaining, understandable, evoking thoughts or ideas, educational, cre-ative, evoking of emotion” (p. 10).

Although they are willing to accept the assertion that “imaginative processes are at the heart of encounters between readers and texts,” Goetz and Sadoski (1996) question the extent to which it is possible to “measure elic-ited imagery and emotional response” (p. 221). To account for the “dearth of studies on this topic,” they suggest that aesthetic response is “too private, too ephemeral and idiosyncratic to be accessible to objective scientific inquiry” (p. 222). Even if empathy does play a role in comprehension, they argue, it remains difficult to determine whether empathy generates comprehension or “comprehension generates the capacity to empathize” (p. 255).

Bleich (1980) and Miall (1996) see no argument for response being the starting point for the study of aesthetic experience, but neither moves in the direction of conflating the response itself as evidence of aesthetic engage-ment—rather, Bleich (1980) in particular sees response as a “reaction to an aesthetic object” (p. 138), whether this aesthetic object is a text, a work of visual art, a sculpture, and so on. In support of this assertion, he notes that Rosenblatt cautions against readers straying too far from the text (p. 145).

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The difficulty of assessing the aesthetic nature of response and experi-ence is not lost on Rosenblatt (1938/1995) either. In her view, “the student would tend not to speak of this phase”—that is, entering the world of the text, living through it—“precisely because of [the] formal and stylistic elements” that define whether a text is a work of art or not (p. 276). Furthermore, she suggests that “the entire experience of reading has a structure and an inner logic, a completeness that only a great work of art can offer” (p. 10). For Rosenblatt, the reader’s sense of this experience, which she assumes is perceived as a whole, remains intuitive, not yet articulated; only after “an inductive study of the text” can the response be identified and supported in what she describes as a “more controlled, more and more valid or defensible response to the text” (p. 267).

This hardly resembles the libertarian Rosenblatt who supposedly praised the role of individual, idiosyncratic responses to literary text. Dress-man and Webster (2003) suggest that Rosenblatt’s stance on the role of individual response “requires teachers and critics to respect students’ in-dividual experiences of texts while holding them to precise expression and well-grounded reasoning, and urges readers to reassert the social and cultural benefits of aesthetic experiences in their everyday lives”—a role for response that is “as relevant and radical in the year 2001 as it was in 1938” (p. 142).

Conclusions and Future Directions

That Rosenblatt (1995) feels impelled to defend her apparent distinctions between aesthetic and efferent reading and to argue that they are not dia-metrically opposed, and that she has not been, as Dressman and Webster (2003) point out, entirely consistent in her defining of “aesthetic response,” suggests that it is time to consider the addition of a descriptor that avoids the need (inherent in retaining the concept and term “aesthetic”) of hav-ing to qualify it. Again, Rosenblatt (1938/1995) does not valorize response to a literary text at the expense of the text, nor does she eulogize personal response. To the contrary, she argues that

[t]here is nothing in the recognition of the personal nature of literature that requires acceptance of the notion that every evocation from a text is as good as another. We need only think of our successive readings of the same text . . . to know that we can [and do] differentiate. Undisciplined, irrelevant, or distorted emotional responses and the lack of relevant ex-perience, or knowledge, will of course, lead to inadequate interpretations of the text. (p. 267)

As readers may likely agree, the term “aesthetic” is culturally and his-

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torically loaded, and it inevitably brings with its use expectations of behaviors that are notoriously difficult to capture (Bleich, 1978; Goetz & Sadoski, 1996; Graesser et al., 1996; Iser, 1978). Researchers who have argued in support of Rosenblatt’s “aesthetic response” might find the addition of the descriptor “expressive response” useful, and potentially less confounding, in terms of understanding what affective responses contribute to the process of reading literary text. As Miall (1993) suggests, doing so may therefore provide the field with a “set of practices modeled on an enhanced understanding of the response process” (p. 63) that would enable teachers to better understand the role of personal response in the context of literary reading. Common sense in terms of recognizing personal experiences as readers of literature (as distinct from readers of informational text) should enable an affirma-tion that “literary texts seem to possess certain features that require (or at least, invite) the aesthetic reading” (Miall, 1993, p. 65). Again, adding “expressive response” does not mean adding a developmental descriptor. It’s entirely feasible that readers will, at times, respond “expressively” and, at other times, “aesthetically” for a variety of reasons. However, it is also potentially useful to include a descriptor that might enable teachers to determine whether students are (or are not) expanding the range of their response profiles over time. Growth is, after all, one of the primary goals of any educational endeavor.

For young readers, personal response is typically not articulated in terms of what Miall (1993) terms the “deviant features” of either literary prose or poetry (p. 65). Rather, as McGinley et al. (1997) found, young readers are more likely to be stimulated to link what they experience in the literary text to similar events or emotions in their own lives. This may be perceived by some as developmental; however, it may be just as likely that young readers come to reading “fresh” and have yet to fully absorb the mores of reading in ways promoted by schooling. If “emotions primarily represent self-referential concerns,” as Miall (1993, p.75) argues on the basis of several studies, then Jakobson’s (1987) equally self-referential “expressive” function of language provides a term that can account for a range of personal connections that readers make to literary texts, thus allowing a differentiation between those connections as either “aesthetic response” or “an expressive response.” Adding the category “expressive response” to a response repertoire (as both teachers and researchers) helps to characterize a range of responses to liter-ature—a range already existing—without having to label affective responses as being failed aesthetic ones. Readers, at all levels of sophistication, will at some time, with some literary text, respond expressively. And authentic literary reading allows that such response may be the only response to a

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particular literary text. Interactions with other literary texts at other times may invite or elicit other kinds of response (i.e., aesthetic and/or efferent) and may invite multiple kinds of responses.

Finally, by clarifying important distinctions between “expressive” and “aesthetic” responses to literature, teachers of literature might find an avenue for self-exploration—that is, an exploration of their own responses to literature and how those responses influence them in terms of responses they favor from students. Such an exploration may, in turn, lead to a recon-sideration of how students’ responses to literature are assessed.

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Anna O. Soter is a professor at The Ohio State University, School of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology, Columbus, Ohio.Ian A. G. Wilkinson is an associate professor at The Ohio State University, School of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecol-ogy, Columbus, Ohio.Sean P. Connors is a Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University, School of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology, Colum-bus, Ohio.P. Karen Murphy is a professor in the Department of Educational and School Psychology and Special Education at Pennsylvania State University, Univer-sity Park, Pennsylvania.Vincent Fu-Yuan Shen is an assistant professor in the Department of English at National Taitung University, Taitung, Taiwan.

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Deconstructing “Aesthetic Response” in Small-Group Discussions about Literature: A Possible Solution to the “Aesthetic Response” Dilemma