1. The Reader
the Text
the Poem
The Transactional Theory of the
Literary Work
Louise
M.Rosenblatt

2. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 Rosenblatt
sketches some of the major
process involved in evoking the work
from the text.
 There are different functions readers go
through as they read the text and how
this activities influence their response to
literature.

3. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 Through
conscious and unconscious
choice, the reader uses the verbal clues
given by the author ( diction, setting,
character development) along with
personal circumstance and experience,
to form his or her response to the work.
 Through these activities, the reader
becomes part of the creative process
along with the author.

4. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 Through
the reader’s evocation and
interpretation of a poem, actually has the
power to change the text.
 Different readers have “decidedly
diverse personal responses which
become woven into the texture of the
experienced poem” (p. 65)

5. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 The
author gives the examples of a
reader’s cultural background, personal
experience and literary knowledge as
elements which can dramatically change
a piece of literature for that reader.
 There are no “wrong” response because
reader response is always the reader
response. It is built out of logic and
experience of the reader.

6. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 So,
teachers must not set boundaries for
interpretation of the text instead give the
students the freedom to be part of the
creative process and respond to the text
according their personal experience.

7. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 Explains
that the experience of evoking
the poem goes on as the reader gets
further into the works.
 The
term poem here refers to the artistic
creation that the reader constructs while
reading a literary work. (Rosenblatt is not
discussing only poetry here but any
artistic work of literature)

8. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 The
reader “is immersed in a creative
process that goes on largely below the
threshold of awareness” (p.52).
 This
process “imposes the delicate task
of sorting the relevant from the irrelevant
in a continuing process of selection,
revision and expansion: (p.53)

9. P.54
As one decodes the opening lines or sentences
and pages of a text, one begins to develop a
tentative sense of a framework within which to
place what will follow. Underlying this is the
assumption that this body of words, set forth in
certain patterns and sequences on the page,
bears the potentiality for a reasonably unified
or integrated, or at the very least coherent,
experience.

10. P.54
One evolves certain expectations about
the diction, the subject, the ideas, the
themes, the kind of text, that will signal
certain possibilities and exclude others,
thus limiting the arc of expectations.
What the reader has elicited form the
text up to any point generates a
receptivity to certain kinds of ideas,
overtones, or attitudes.

11. P. 54
Perhaps one can think of this as an
alerting certain areas of memory, a
stirring-up of certain reservoirs of
experience, knowledge, and feeling. As
the reading proceeds, attention will be
fixed on the reverberations of
implications that result from fulfillment or
frustration of those expectations.

12. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 This
process itself is part of the appeal
of reading a work of literature.
 P.54-55

13. CAPTER 4: EVOKING A POEM
 One
potential objection to the reader-response
theory of literary criticism is that it suggests
that anyone’s reading of a work is just as valid
as any other reading.
 Some
readings are more informed than others
and that people can become better readers
through practice and experience:

14. Extract from the book:
 Past
literary experiences serve as subliminal
guides as to anticipated, the details to be
attended to, the kinds of organizing patterns to
be evolved. (p.57)
 Traditional
subjects, themes, treatments, may
provide the guides to organization and the
background against which to recognize
something new or original in the text. (p.57)

15. Extract from the book:
 Awareness-more
or less explicit-of
repetitions, echoes, resonances,
repercussions, linkages, cumulative
effects, contrasts, of surprises is the
mnemonic matrix for the structuring of
emotion, idea, situation, character, plotin short, for the evocation of a work of
art. (p.58)

16. CHAPTER 4: EVOKING THE POEM
 For
the experienced reader, much of this
has become automatic, carried on
through a continuing flow of responses,
syntheses, readjustment and
assimilation.
 The
reader’s reading process allows
“compatible associations into the focus
of attention. (p.60)

17. TO SUMMARIZE:
2
streams of responses involved in any
reading event:
# evocation
# interpretation
 Cannot
be separated.

18. TO SUMMARIZE:
 Rosenblatt
argues “the range of potential
responses and the gamut of degrees of
intensity and articulateness are infinitely
vast, since they depend not only on the
character of the text but even more on
the special character of the individual
reader” (p.49)

19. TO SUMMARIZE:
 The
readers’ role in evoking and
interpreting the poem can be quite
complex.
 The
text’s involvement in this process is
of equal importance

20. TO SUMMARIZE:
 Each
genre makes different demands of a
reader.
 New
meaning arrives on the scene concerning
the expectation the reader has of each
particular work.
 Brings
to work past associations and
experiences

21. THE END
Presented by:
AZLINDA ZAFIRAH BINTI ASHAARY
AFIQAH AMANINA
NOOR HARMIMI BT ABDUL HALIM