Den talande bokens poetik - Doria

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life world of the individual, the reader has to reflect and perhaps change opinion,
a phenomenon that Iser called “melting of horizons”.
Rosenblatt (2002) contributed with the concepts "efferent and aesthetical
reading". She also saw the reading act as an active event and stressed the fruitful
interaction between reader and text. She called the interaction “transaction”, and
described the transaction as a movement forth and back where the world of the
reader and the world of the text penetrate each other (Rosenblatt 2002, 14).
Rosenblatt’s opinion was that the reader “reads the world” in two different ways:
an efferent way and an aesthetic way. Efferent reading refers to facts: the reader
wants to have information and does not necessarily have to engage emotionally
in the reading. Personal, intuitive, emotional and creative and interpreting
attitudes are put in the background and the reader reads in an impersonal way. In
order to create a poem or to understand a fiction the reader has to read in a
different way; he or she has to broaden his or her awareness so it includes also
personal and emotional attitudes and thoughts. Rosenblatt called this way of
reading aesthetic. She pointed out that these two different ways of reading did
not necessarily have to exclude each other. Rosenblatt’s concepts are used in the
analysis and they also have an impact on the research design and on the
construction of the questions in the interview manual. Research questions 1 and
2 explore the efferent and the aesthetic perspectives.
Langer (1995) uses the concept “envisionments” to describe the individual
worlds of imagination that a reader creates in his or her mind in the encounter
with a text-world. She thinks that envisionment building is an activity in sensemaking,
“where meanings change and shift and grow as a mind creates its
understanding of a work” (Langer 1995, 14). In the same way as Rosenblatt, she
thinks that there is a constant interaction, or transaction, between the reader and
the text and that the meaning that is created is a unique meeting of the two.
Langer claims that an envisionment is not just visual or based only on language
experience – it also encompasses what a person thinks, feels and senses,
sometimes knowingly, but often merely tacitly, as he or she builds an
understanding. Langer sees envisionments as text-worlds that are individual and
dynamic sets of ideas, pictures, questions, expectations, arguments and hunches
that all represent material for reflections and interpretations. Interpretation is
understanding, Langer claims (Langer 1995, 15). She also thinks that
envisionments can change across time when the reader reads and develops new
thoughts. Something he or she did not understand in the beginning of the story
receives an explanation later on when he or she gets more information about the
circumstances at hand. Langer believes that readers have a number of options
available as they develop their understanding. She calls these options “stances”
and gives them great importance in the act of envisionment building because
every stance can offer different vantage points from which to gain ideas. Langer
(1995, 15-19) mentions four different stances, namely: