The “Banking Concept” and “The Literary Transaction”

In her article, “The Literary Transaction: Evocation and Response,” Louise M. Rosenblatt writes about “reader-response theory,” which suggests a reader-centered approach to interpreting a text. Rather than the student passively absorbing information from a text, reader-response theory represents the student as having a more active role in the reading process. The student’s experiences and preconceptions she brings while she reads a text are equally as important to the eventual interpretation as the content of the text itself. This rejection of a unidirectional model of reading resembles Freire’s rejection of the authoritative teacher-student relationship. She writes, “Reading is a transaction, a two-way process…” (268). Likewise, Freire supports a more reciprocal relationship between students and teachers, in which the teacher “is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach” (4).