Some new ways of thinking about some old ways of reading: transactional aesthetics, literature and the agon

ABSTRACT This article is meant as a useful classroom methodology by which teachers of literature may give their students a coherent rubric for understanding literary meaning and exegesis which can incorporate most literary theories while addressing the basic-to-advanced concepts required of literary students. Also, it will provide a working methodology for the inclusion of certain evolutionary aesthetic concerns as part of understanding literature. Mixing Dante’s ‘Four Levels’ with Rosenblatt’s idea of ‘transactional reading’ and Dissanayake’s four criteria for an evolutionary aesthetic model, this article yields a broad, powerful and common-sensical method of literary analysis by examining literature as a series of tensions (or what I will call ‘the agon’) between Dante’s schema, Rosenblatt’s efferent/aesthetic divide, between humans as natural and cultural beings, and the tension between literature’s textuality and its contextuality.