This dissertation explores the history of Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory and its implications for college-level instruction in literacy, broadly conceived as a critical and a cultural practice. I argue that Rosenblatt's work proves most significant for framing explorations of reading and writing as two dimensions of a single educative project: this against the many institutional and scholarly trends by which text-based reception and production are understood as belonging to largely separable programs of study. Indeed, it is English studies' long-standing disciplinary habit of disaggregating the work of the writing classroom from the work of literary and cultural study that I see as the fundamental problem that Rosenblatt's work helps to reframe and begin to resolve.;As intellectual history and recontextualization project, this dissertation maintains that the promise of Rosenblatt's work remains untapped if only understood through the lens of the disciplinary schisms that have long structured English studies; and that Rosenblatt's insights gain new relevance when re-situated in their originating philosophical context of the nineteen-thirties. I reconstruct this context---and its significance for Rosenblatt's later transactional theory---through an investigation of Rosenblatt's overlooked early career, output, and key influences, most specifically by reviving the dialogues that her first works of scholarship initiated with a richly interdisciplinary and transatlantic range of early-twentieth-century pragmatic-progressive thinkers, including Franz Boas, Fernand Baldensperger, I. A. Richards, and John Dewey. Such a recovery shows Rosenblatt's oeuvre, from its earliest scholarship to its final statements, to have constituted a sustained inquiry into an ecological concept of "transaction"---whereby knowledge is understood to emerge from the mutually conditioning interplay between agents, situations and texts---and into the import of "transaction" for a theory of literacy, of literature, and of the reading-writing benefits enabled by what she later terms an "aesthetic" stance. Moreover, the milieu of thinkers consolidated by Rosenblatt's work---all studying various forms of cultural-knowledge-in-transit---offers a provocative challenge to English studies' usual narratives about its reading- and writing-oriented subfields' historical and purportedly proper divisibility.;This recovery also supports my final theoretical intervention---the argument that Rosenblatt's inquiries into transaction and stance are particularly pertinent to current writing studies questions concerning literacy knowledge transfer. I show that Rosenblatt's "aesthetic" and "efferent" stances, once viewed through the lens of her seminal philosophical commitments, offer a newly integrative explanatory model for the dynamics by which learners not only make meaning from texts, but also reinvest and repurpose ("transfer") their literacy knowledge, and not only across new contexts and tasks, but also across the dimensions of text-based literacy itself (reading and writing). Based on the new genealogy I construct for her work, I further posit that Rosenblatt's transactional theory presents literacy as an expansively cultural practice, a paradigm that encourages learners to draw more purposive, self-reflective, and critical connections between their reading and writing, and that helps learners to realize and leverage the ways that culturally supported literacy practices can themselves work to transform cultures in their turn.
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