The poet, the child and the blackbird: aesthetic reading and spiritual development

Abstract

This article explores the potential and limitations of Louise Rosenblatt's account of aesthetic reading as a basis for understanding the relationship between literary experience and spiritual development. It does so by examining a particular act of reading involving a poem by Ernst Jandl in the light of Rosenblatt's account of ‘aesthetic reading’ and Kierkegaard's categories of the poet and the child. It is argued that an account of the relationship of spirituality to the reading of literature needs to go beyond the immediate experience of the act of reading and take into account the way that literary meanings are responded to in later living and the way in which attentiveness to textual detail can be rooted in spiritual attitudes.

Keywords:

• Spiritual development
• Aesthetic reading
• Rosenblatt
• Kierkegaard
• Literature pedagogy

Notes

Corresponding author. Department of Germanic and Asian Languages, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA. Email: [email protected]

From: Ernst Jandl, poetische Werke, ed. Klaus Siblewski, © 1997 by Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Mu¨nchen, a member of the Random House Ltd. Publishing Group.