Reading and Meaning, Louis Rosenblatt and Gary Paulsen

Where is the meaning of the text when reading?  In the text, the author?   Louis Rosenblatt showed us the way, and Gary Paulsen said it poetically.    Meaning is made by the reader.  


“The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the text.” 
― Louise Rosenblatt, Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays


If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.
The book needs you.” 
― Gary Paulsen, The Winter Room


And that means. . . 

And why do we read? Pleasure, for Information?

Efferent reading = scientific or public.  The purpose of the reading is focused on learning through reading.

Aesthetic reading = artistic or private. The purpose of the reading is experiencing the text and the literary world created by the author. 

“No two readings, even by the same person are identical. Still, someone else can read a text differently and paraphrase it for us in such a way as to satisfy our efferent purpose.  But no one else can read aesthetically- that is, experience the evocation of – a literary work of art for us” (Rosenblatt, p. 1375).

With the current focus on the Common Core Standards , what is happening to our understanding of the reading process, how and why students reader?