Louise Rosenblat (b. 1904–d.

2005) was a highly influential thinker in literary and critical theory, reading
pedagogy, and education. She was professor of education at New York University from 1948 until 1972,
and she continued to teach for many years at other universities. The impact of her writings extends to
aesthetics, communication and media studies, and cultural studies. Her transactional theory of reading
literature earned a permanent place among methodologies applied to the study of reader
comprehension and improving the teaching of reading, from preschool to college-age years. She is most
widely known for her “reader response” theory of literature. The process of reading is a dynamic
transaction between the reader and the text, in which meaningful ideas arise for readers from their own
thoughtful and creative interpretations. Her first book, Literature as Exploration, which was published in
1938, has gone through five editions and remains in print in the early 21st century. Her last book, Making
Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays, was published in 2005 and contained selected essays from each
decade of her career. Rosenblatt’s view of literary experience threw down a challenge to a dominant
paradigm during the 1940s and 1950s, namely the New Criticism. New Criticism held that authentic
meanings of a piece of creative writing—a novel, story, drama, poem, and so on—are already within the
text itself, requiring attention to that somewhat concealed yet objective truth. Rosenblatt took the
pragmatist approach, starting from the aesthetics of reading. As a member of the Conference on
Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences at Columbia University during the 1930s, she studied John
Dewey, Charles Peirce, and William James. During this time, she married the pragmatist philosopher
Sidney Ratner. Rosenblatt applied her knowledge of pragmatism to the question of understanding
creative writing. For pragmatism, all experiences are creative fusions of intersecting processes, some
from within and some from without. Any comprehension of a text blends the reader’s particular
approach for appreciating it together with the capacity of the text to provoke a variety of stimulating
ideas. The emotional and the factual are rarely found in pure forms; only a gradual range from the
affective to the cognitive can characterize lived experience. Understanding the process of reading in its
fundamental experiential situation has been a revolutionary philosophical position, impacting both
childhood education and literary theory. Rosenblatt’s work continues to inspire fresh academic research
and curricular innovations.

Major Writings

Rosenblatt’s central text is Literature as Exploration (1938), which went through five editions and
remains in print. Her other widely studied work is The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional
Theory of the Literary Work (1978). Many of her impactful articles were gathered in Making Meaning
with Texts: Selected Essays (2005). The Louise Rosenblatt Papers (1904–2005) are held at the Southern
Illinois University Special Collections in Carbondale, Illinois.

FISH, STANLEY (1938– ), U.S. literary theorist. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Fish earned his doctoral
degree in English literature from Yale University in 1962. He taught at the University of California,
Berkeley, and at Johns Hopkins University, before becoming professor of English and of law at Duke
University (1985–98). He also served as the executive director of the Duke University Press from 1993 to
1998. Fish was then dean of arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1999 to 2004.

Considered a leading scholar on John Milton, Fish is a well-known and sometimes controversial literary
theorist. His first published work, John Skelton's Poetry, appeared in 1965, but he rose to prominence
with the publication of his second book, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" (1967). Here Fish
first presented his theory of "reader-response criticism," in which he argues that reading is a temporal
phenomenon and that the meaning of a literary work is located within the reader's experience of the
text. His Self-consuming Artifacts (1972) elaborated and developed the notion of reader response into a
theory of interpretive communities, in which a reader's interpretation of a text depends on the reader's
membership in one or more communities that share a set of assumptions. Is There a Text in This Class?
The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980), a collection of Fish's essays, established his position
as one of the most influential literary theorists of his day.

In his later works, Fish extended literary theory into the arenas of politics and law, writing on the politics
of the university, the nature of free speech, and connections between literary theory and legal theory.
These works include Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in
Literary and Legal Studies (1989), There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too
(1994), Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995), and The Trouble with
Principle (1999). There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, seen by some as a critique of liberalism,
generated much debate. In The Trouble with Principle, Fish suggests that the application of principles
impedes democracy, and he examines affirmative action as a case in point, again sparking wide-ranging
critique. In 2005 Fish was named the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities
and Law at Florida International University, with a principal appointment in the College of Law and a role
as lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Norman N. Holland (September 19, 1927, New York City - September 28, 2017) was an American literary
critic and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida.[1]

Holland's scholarship focused largely on psychoanalytic criticism and cognitive poetics, subjects on which
he wrote fifteen books and nearly 250 scholarly articles.[2] He is widely recognized for his scholarship
specifically related to psychoanalytic applications in literary study. He was known as a major scholar of
literary theory, primarily for having been one of the pioneers of reader-response criticism.[3] Holland's
writings have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Persian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.[4]

Academic positions and professional history Edit

Holland received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1947 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) and a J.D. in 1950 from Harvard Law School. As his interests shifted from patent law to literature he
was accepted as a doctoral student at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in English
Literature in 1956. He then accepted an appointment in MIT's School of Humanities, where he taught
until 1966, becoming head of the literature section. Holland also trained at the Boston Psychoanalytic
Society and Institute, graduating in 1966. In the same year he accepted a position as chair of the
Department of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he became McNulty
Professor. In 1983, he was named a Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar by the University of Florida,[5]
where he taught until his retirement in 2008.

Holland received an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in 1974-75 and a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1979-80.

Holland served on several committees of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and was a member
and nominating committee chair of the English Institute. He was also a member of the following
organizations: the Association Internationale d'Esthétique Experimentale, the Shakespeare Association of
America, the International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE), the Society for Cinema
and Media Studies (editor and council member, 1963), the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
(affiliate member, 1965- ), and the Western New York Psychoanalytic Society (1969-1983). He was also a
founder and steering committee member of the Buffalo, Gainesville, and Boston branches of the Group
for Applied Psychoanalysis.

Since 1976, Holland served as a scientific associate at the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and
Dynamic Psychiatry and since 1981 had been on the advisory board of the D. W. Winnicott Library. He
participated in the Personal Testimony Group of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and in the
Tampa Psychoanalytic Study Group since 1985.

In 1993, Holland founded the PSYART online discussion group and was its active moderator. He was also
the founder and former editor of PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychology of the Arts, which has
been in publication since 1997. The PSYART activities was recently consolidated into the PSYART
Foundation thanks to a generous grant from Holland and his late wife. He also served on the editorial
boards of the Psychoanalytic Review and the peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal, Projections: The
Journal for Movies and Mind.
Besides being the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida,[6] Holland also held
more than a dozen membership roles, board positions and teaching appointments. Some such major
appointments and memberships include: Member of the McKnight Brain Institute, visiting professorships
at Stanford University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and University of Paris VII (Charles V) and
University of Paris VIII (Vincennes - Saint-Denis), and the director of the Center for the Psychological
Study of the Arts at SUNY Buffalo.[7]

New Criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism

Reader-response theoryEdit

Poems in Persons: An Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature (1973; rev. ed. 2000)[14] proposes
a very different model of literary processing based on a psychoanalytic theory of identity. The central
argument of the text is that writers create texts as expressions of their personal identities and readers
re-create their own identities when they respond. These identities can be understood as a central theme
or themes and behavioral variations on them, much like a theme-and-variations in music.

5 Readers Reading (1975)[15] pursues this conclusion based on case studies of five university students
who gave free association responses (according to psychoanalytic technique) to three short stories. They
showed that their literary experiences were shaped by readers' identities, and not by the texts they read.

Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (1982)[16] surveyed theories of laughter. But the book extended the
reader-response argument to show, based on a case study of one woman, how what one finds funny,
that is, one's sense of humor, expresses one's personal identity.