Textual Transactions: Recontextualizing Louise Rosenblatt’s Transactional Theory for the College Writing Classroom by Elizabeth Bachrach Hutton A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English and Education) in The University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Anne Ruggles Gere, Chair Professor Amanda S. Anderson, Brown University Associate Professor Gina N. Cervetti Professor Marjorie B. Levinson Elizabeth Bachrach Hutton [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1978-6707 © Elizabeth B Hutton 2018 DEDICATION For my parents, Gretchen Bachrach and Ernie Hutton, whose transactional readings and writings were my first inspiration ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Premiere thanks go to the immediate advisors and mentors for this project. The work of this dissertation would not have been possible without the sterling example and steady guidance provided by my dissertation chair, Anne Ruggles Gere. From the very beginnings of my doctoral work, Anne’s advice, support, insights, and depth of knowledge have been crucial. Marjorie Levinson has also been invaluable to this work and to my development as a thinker—her detailed critiques and high intellectual spirits were and continue to be genuinely fortifying. Gina Cervetti’s careful and committed sense of purpose as a researcher and teacher were also deeply formative, always pushing me to more rigorous consideration of alternate perspectives and explanations. And Amanda Anderson’s devotion to defending the humanities and her analytical tenacity served throughout as a spur to my own thinking. I am endlessly grateful for the intellectual high standards and interdisciplinary curiosity embodied by this committee. Those I could count as mentors, however, extends beyond my those who sat on my committee. Anne Curzan deserves particular mention. Her discipline-spanning work on the culturally complex dynamics of language change provided, I now realize, a ghost-template for this dissertation’s investigation and argument. I have also benefitted enormously from the guidance and fortifications offered by Walter Cohen—our conversations about this work came at key moments. Throughout my graduate career, Meg Sweeney has also provided crucial advice and iii encouragement. Meg helped me to slow down and to stay calm during some of my most vulnerable moments as a student; her continued interest in my project and my career, and her willingness to help me work through many of its details through, were truly sustaining. Shannon Winston also stands as a particularly crucial piece of this intellectual project. Without her tireless translating of Rosenblatt’s Reminiscences and Baldensperger’s late essays, and without her tireless willingness to question, tweak and reconceptualize the meaning of these texts, little of this dissertation would have been possible. Shannon was a wonderful intellectual collaborator for the complex work of reconstituting Rosenblatt’s earliest academic efforts. I thank her deeply for her generosity, intelligence, and endless good will. This dissertation could not have been completed without support from my colleagues in the Joint Program in English and Education, in the English department’s program in Language and Literature, and Women’s Studies, and in the Sweetland Center for Writing. My immediate cohort, Ruth Anna Spooner and Chris Parsons, offered key support, especially through their generous readings of my often very rough drafts. With their own work and comportment, these cohort-mates set admirably high standards for me to try to match. My Graduate Student Research Assistant colleagues, Naitnaphit Lamlamai, Emily Wilson, Ryan McCarty, Anna Knutson, Ben Keating, Sarah Swofford, and Christie Toth all taught me an enormous amount about the variety of methods, questions and skepticisms we can bring to the study of literacy and composition. I have also benefitted from conversation with Anne Burke, Elizabeth Tacke, James Hammond, Molly Parsons, and Aubrey Schiavone. From Language and Literature, an especially important shout-out is due to Kyle Frisina, for her friendship and the role she has played as generous and iv open-minded intellectual interlocutor—talk with her has served as an invaluable sharpening stone for my ideas. Aran Ruth and Adam Sneed have been true friends and intellectual allies. Kathryne Bevilacqua has provided crucial feedback and perspective, plus a needful dose of the wry. For their generosity in sharing their work-in-process and responding to mine, I must also thank Annie Bolotin, Pavel Godfrey, Mason Jabbari, Nadav Linial, Ross Martin, Halley O’Malley, Yeshua Tolle and Megan Torti. Joey Gamble has always been supportive and engaged. And last but far from least, my dear friends and colleagues from the Sweetland Center for Writing and English Department Writing Program continue to inspire and instruct me, most specifically Louis Ciciarrelli, Nick Harp, Angie Berkley, Ali Shapiro, and Christine Modey. Also deserving thanks is the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, whose generous fellowship allowed me to belabor this dissertation for an entire unimpeded year. Sid Smith, then director of the institute, gave kind and inspirational advice over the years. Linda Gregerson, in and out of class, continued to foster my suspicion that the creative and the critical fed each other far more than our institutional structures sometimes imply. Finally, I have cherished friends—many of whom also count as colleagues—whose influence and support have been instrumental for this work. They all share the virtues of candor and high humor; a devotion to ideas, to art, and to teaching; big brains; and big hearts. Gina Brandolino has been invaluable. T Hetzel has been invaluable. Ellen Muehlberger has been invaluable. Carol Tell has been invaluable. Gail Gibson: collaborating on and sharing work with her over the years made my doctoral program even brighter than it otherwise would have been. She and Stephen Henderson, both, ergo, have provided key support and inspiration. Same with Kaitlin and Daniel v Raimi. Alex Murphy. Robert Hampshire. Naomi Silver and Paul Morsink. Ernie Poortinga and Larissa Larson. Christine Montross. Stephanie Snow. Emelie Gevalt and Ollie Marshall. Whitney Dunlap and Jesse Menning. And for their more general advice, enthusiasm, and interest: Budge Gere. Roger and Elaine Ralph. Ellen Luria and Ron Naveen. Gretchen Bachrach and Fred Gevalt. Ernie Hutton and Anne Moore. Deborah Salem Smith, dearest friend and intellectual soul mate, has long been the person I turn to—for her tireless imagination and dogged obsessiveness—to work through my most pressing questions and nascent ideas. For this project, her role was no different. My sister, Elinor Hutton, through talk and through example, gives invaluable emotional and intellectual ballast—confidence, perspective, and courage. My boys, Max and Charlie, deserve their thanks, too—for their wonderful patience and impatience, which, combined, kept me, at least relatively, on the straight and narrow. Finally, great thanks are due to my husband, Alex Ralph. Alex has never been less than entirely supportive of even my most harebrained schemes or notions. He is a life partner I am lucky to have: informed, bright, curious, generous, candid. A great reader and writer, innovator and critic, he exemplifies—for me, at least—the “total situation.” vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………. ………. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………… iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….. viii Foreword: Rosenblatt’s Transactional Theory of Literacy and the Transfer of Reading-Writing Knowledge……………………………………………………................ 1 Chapter One: Rosenblatt’s Contested Legacy in English Studies: A Reception Study and Intervention……………………………………………………………………. 25 Chapter Two: Literacy’s “Total Situation”: The Origins of Rosenblatt’s Transactional Theory in Boasian Anthropology and French Comparatism………….. 66 Chapter Three: The Problem with “Stock”: The Origins and Implications of Rosenblatt’s Efferent Stance………………………………………………........................ 118 Chapter Four: Art and Innovation: The Origins and Implications of Rosenblatt’s Aesthetic Stance………………………………………………………………… ……….... 169 Chapter Five: The Reader in the Writer: Textual Transactions and the Transfer of Literacy Knowledge…………………………………………………………………….. 228 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………….. 269 vii ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the history of Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory and its implications for college-level instruction in literacy, broadly conceived as a critical and a cultural practice. I argue that Rosenblatt’s work proves most significant for framing explorations of reading and writing as two dimensions of a single educative project: this against the many institutional and scholarly trends by which text-based reception and production are understood as belonging to largely separable programs of study. Indeed, it is English studies’ long-standing disciplinary habit of disaggregating the work of the writing classroom from the work of literary and cultural study that I see as the fundamental problem that Rosenblatt’s work helps to reframe and begin to resolve. As intellectual history and recontextualization project, this dissertation maintains that the promise of Rosenblatt’s work remains untapped if only understood through the lens of the disciplinary schisms that have long structured English studies; and that Rosenblatt’s insights gain new relevance when re-situated