One idea that spearheads the early chapters of The Reader, the Text, the Poem is the ongoing discourse about language as perception, language as socially performative behavior, and the scrutinized focus that is paid attention to the relationship between the text and the reader.
With its wholly original descriptive language and its deceptively-woven plot structure, Special Topics in Calamity Physics presents itself as the perfect experiment grounds for studying reader response theory in practice Rosenblatt, a literary theorist of the book The Reader, the Text, the Poem calls the “literary transaction.” Rosenblatt writes that “we do not…take the organism and environment as if we could know about them separately in advance of our special inquiry, but we take their interaction itself as subject matter of study” (Rosenblatt 17) it is this interaction, an ongoing process of the reader interpreting and shaping the text within their own imaginative construction, that we define as the literary transaction, and it is this that we study through the lens of Special Topics in Calamity Physics because its prose forces us into what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading,” even for the unliterary person, and through this we compare the openness and closeness of the text as it functions amongst different genres. Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics easily differentiates itself from other contemporary young adult novels in several regards-its instinctual, unerring prose and its characters as irresistibly developed as living human beings-but one of the chief ways the novel distinguishes itself from its peers is its ability to engage with readers in what Louise M.
This essay was written for WRRH 227: Writing and the Culture of Reading, a reading theory course, in the spring of 2021.
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