Critic Bios

In his Foreword to the 1995 fifth edition of LouiseRosenblatt's Literature as Exploration, Wayne Booth "I doubt that any other literary critic of this century has enjoyed and suffered as sharp a contrast of powerful influence and absurd neglect as Louise Rosenblatt." Rosenblatt's influence in literary criticism began in 1938 with the first appearance of Literature as Exploration, an early exposition of her transactional theory of reading. Rosenblatt was teaching at Columbia's Barnard College (her alma mater) at the time of the book's publication; she had earned her PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris seven years earlier (in 1931). Rosenblatt spent most of her career in relative obscurity, though recognition has come within the past two decades. In 1988, the National Council of English Teachers dedicated their annual conference to Rosenblatt (then professor emeritus at New York University). Two collections of essays on her work also appeared in the early 1990's.

Wolfgang Iser's rise to prominence began in the late 1960's, with his involvement in the innovative University of Constance in Germany. His inaugural lecture at Constance in 1970, titled "Die Appellstruktur der Texte," introduced some of the foundational ideas of his own "reader response" approach to literature. The pair of volumes published the following decade -- The Implied Reader in 1972 and The Act of Reading in 1976 -- developed these ideas further, and Iser himself traveled outside of Europe to lecture (later becoming a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine). Iser's research shifted in the 1980's to a study of what he called "literary anthropology." His most recent books include The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993) and Staging Politics (1993).