In discussion of the reading process, as in other disciplines
undergoing revision, we need to free ourselves from unscrutinized
assumptions implicit in the usual terminology. The usual phrasing
makes it difficult to attempt to do justice to the dynamic nature
of the actual reading event. The reader, we can say, interprets the
text. (The reader acts on the text.) Or we can say, the text
produces a response in the reader. (The text acts on the reader.)
Each of these phrasings, because it implies a single line of action
by one separate element on another separate element, distorts the
actual reading process. This is not a linear relation, but a situation,
an event at a particular time and place in which each element
conditions the other.
The "transactional" terminology developed by John Dewey and
Arthur F. Bentley* seems most appropriate for the view of the
dynamics of the reading process that I have attempted to suggest.
This philosophic approach, for which Dewey developed various
phrasings during his long career, has had repercussions in many
areas of twentieth-century thought. Dewey and Bentley sought to
counteract the nineteenth-century phrasing of phenomena as an
interaction between different factors, as of two separate, self
contained, and already defined entities acting on one another-in a
matter, if one may use a homely example, of two billiard balls
colliding. They offered the term transaction to designate situations
in which the elements or factors are, one might say, aspects of the
total situation in an ongoing process. Thus a known assumes a
knower, and vice versa. A "knowing" is the transaction between a
particular individual and a particular environment.
The transactional view of the reading process not only frees us
from notions of the impact of distinct and fixed entities, but also
underlines the essential importance of both elements, reader and
text, in the dynamic reading transaction. A person becomes a
reader by virtue of his activity in relationship to a text, which he
organizes as a set of verbal symbols. A physical text, a set of marks