Literature as Exploration

. . . my wife as she is a college professor. So cannot comment beyond this.

Don't feel like a philistine. Don't scratch your head and wonder what is the matter with you for not appreciating the world's great literature. Just read this book and it will all come clear. In all likelihood, your literature teacher didn't know how to teach. Rosenblatt's thesis is that without a pro-active, supportive environment in which a novice reader is credited for those things he or she can discern from his/her experience, knowledge, intuition, and reasoning, the most erudite transfer of knowledge from a 'professional' reader to a novice will at best be a delivery of information not unlike the role the pizza guy performs in bringing you your pizza and at worst, promoting a self-doubting reader who will not feel comfortable with his or her own insights. Assuming that a prime reason for reading literature is to sense the 'transpersonal' between writer and reader, anyone who can read should be able to make that connection since we are all human. Of course, expert knowledge and scholarship have their place, but not the first place. The primary place is within, and it is the job of the promoter of 'literature' to help the student find that place within himself or herself--not demean the unenlightened to exact revenge for all those years of torturous graduate school.

If you teach literature (at any level) and haven't read this book, you probably don't know what you are doing.