From "A Rake's Progress" to "Rosie's Walk": Lessons in Aesthetic Reading

Abstract

Aesthetic is Louise Rosenblatt's phrase to distinguish the stance readers adopt when engaging with literary texts,1 as opposed to efferent which is her corresponding description for the stance readers take toward informational texts. Like Douglas Barnes on talking2 and James Britton on writing,3 Rosenblatt on reading resorts to the notion of a continuum to shield this distinction from the charge of caricature. For, clearly, it is facile to categorize any of these modes of language use under two polarized labels. Yet, Rosenblatt's distinction is helpful in explaining some of the differences readers feel when they reflect upon their experiences of reading a novel as opposed to a textbook. In efferent the reader's concern is with what will be carried away from the act; the orientation is utilitarian, the focus is directed toward the information that lies beyond the reading event. By contrast, in the reader's concern is with the feelings and ideas being produced by the act of deciphering; the orientation is to savor what is being lived through at the time, the focus is on the experience itself during the reading event. Closely allied to Rosenblatt's concept of is Wolfgang Iser's theory of aesthetic response;4 and it is Iser who specifically relates his work on reader response to that of E. H. Gombrich on viewer response.5 The similarity encourages the exploration of the idea of aesthetic reading in texts that combine visual and literary elements. It prompts one to ask, What are the reading lessons to be found in those forms that draw upon the conventions of the two arts simultaneously, namely, pictorial narratives? This article juxtaposes the work of England's finest painter of such stories, William Hogarth, with some examples of modem picture books by Raymond Briggs, Pat Hutchins, and others and draws three lessons about aesthetic reading: how pictorial narratives both create and read the culture of their