Transactional Teaching and the Literary Experience.

As I sat in a predictably garish convention room last December listening to Louise Rosenblatt debate David Bleich in what was billed as "NCTE meets at MLA," I started drifting, unable to focus on their topic, "Thinking About Readers." I had heard this discussion before, a long time ago, and the feeling of deja vu was bittersweet. I wasn't bored, and my mental wanderings weren't random, but I was drawn insistently to critical turning points in my own thinking about readers and the teaching of literature. The media-event title of Rosenblatt and Bleich's