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 on a page, becomes the text of a poem or of a scientific formula by virtue of its relationship with a reader who thus interprets it. The transaction is perhaps similar to the electric circuit set up between a negative and positive pole, each of which is inert without the other.
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 elementconditions 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 aparticular individual and a particular environment. The transactional view of the reading process not only frees usfrom 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 on a page, becomes the text of a poem or of a scientific formula by virtue of its relationship with a reader who thus interprets it. The transaction is perhaps similar to the electric circuit set up between a negative and positive pole, each of which is inert without the other.
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