Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning 4/2005

Literature as Exploration
tinct, was a perfectly good way of handling the
problems in physics and in general. This way
of thinking was then carried over to research
and thinking about other kinds of relationships.
But after the whole Einsteinium change in the
way of thinking about the atomic, subatomic
world, it became apparent that the Newtonian
way of thinking of an interaction between
human beings and nature was not appropriate,
because in the interaction or the relationship
between organic creatures, human beings and
nature, one cannot control all the factors in the
way that you can when you carry on a physical
experiment. This of course became apparent
to people so that we had the atomic scientists
recognizing that the observer is part of what he
observes. That if you change the frameworks
within which you are interpreting things you
are going to see something different. And so
the whole idea of transaction emerged and it
was John Dewey who in 1949 suggested that
the term “transaction” should be used when we
are talking about organic living entities relating
themselves to an environment. Dewey pointed
out that it was a term that he used instead of
experience that we were living with this constant
interplay with our environment and that
therefore we should speak of the transaction
between human beings and their environment.
I saw that was a perfect way of expressing my
understanding of the relationship between the
reader and the text. The word transaction, of
course, often is associated with the idea of business.
But it is not because it is business that it
is transaction, the business is a transaction. In
another word, if you have a buyer that implies
a seller. And if you have a seller that implies a
buyer. And that makes it a transaction. So that
the same thing goes on when we talk about college
nowadays, we are very much aware of the
extent to which human beings are constantly
drawing upon their environment, but they are
also constantly affecting it. And it is that constant
interplay, between the reader and the text
that I particularly wanted to emphasize, which
I discovered in my discussion of the reading of
literary works. And that it was because of this,
the fact that you do not have a static reader and
static text. You have a reader who changes as the
text is emerging in front of him or her. And you
have a text that is constantly being interpreted
because, what the reader brings to the text and,
of course, that is where changes and ideas about
language became so important.
Q: Do you agree that your thinking was very
much a part of modern science
LRM: Yes, modern science and the thinking
of the Russian psychologist Vygotsky. Vygot-
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