The Literary Transaction

Abstract

Current controversies over theories of literature have great importance for the future of literature teaching in our schools, colleges, and universities. My purpose is to sketch for you some basic aspects of my transactional theory of literature and its implications for teaching. I term it ‘the transactional theory’, to differentiate it both from traditional approaches and from other so-called ‘reader-response’ theories. Professor M. H. Abrams, in his essay on ‘Construing and Deconstructing’ (see above, pp. 30–65), has offered us various caveats against what he fears to be the imminent predominance of the deconstructionists. I heartily agree with his warnings about the limitations and dangers of their theories and practices, and would perhaps advance further philosophic, cultural, and political reasons for that position. Deconstructionists seem to me basically anti-humanist. Their semiotic and literary doctrines, which make language a closed system, ultimately deny an actual reader in an actual reading situation. For them, the reader becomes simply the locus, the crossroad, where different linguistic codes and conventions converge.