While reading The Reader, the Text, the Poem, I came to the realization that I have not as of yet struggled through a theoretical book and thus have not developed strategies for reading theory.
My encounters with theory of reading have primarily been through summarizations and key quotes that exemplify the particular theory. I was satisfied with knowing the basic differences between aesthetic and efferent reading that I had learned years ago, and with knowing that the reader should not be taken out of the equation. I was forced, however, to follow Rosenblatt’s discussion of all this and more in detail. It was a struggle, and, as I try to identify my strategies for getting though it, I can’t seem to pin point anything. I am typically an annotator, but found little of anything to write. The only way I managed to read this was to get in a mind set, or a stance (to try to use Rosenblatt’s terms) to read theory. I had to go in with an understanding of what my task was and accomplish it without getting caught up in what I didn’t like or felt like I didn’t need to know.
There was one thing in the book that struck me as a conglomerate of all the parts. It was, oddly enough, parenthetical. Rosenblatt mentions Warhol’s pop art and says: "These so called avant-garde artists seem to be rediscovering the basic alphabet of aesthetics; though their works are often very minor indeed, they may be performing a function by educating a public largely wedded to purely efferent attitudes to begin the slow development of aesthetic attention to an awareness of their own responses" (82). This sentence heightens (for me) the conflict between efferent and aesthetic reading and reveals our tendency to look at things, even literature, with an efferent stance. It seems necessary to take subjects that usually elicit efferent responses and put them in aesthetic roles. The aesthetic response