Louise Rosenblatt, who died February 8 at age 100, was a New York University professor whose ideas about reading had far-reaching effects on the teaching of English in grade schools and anticipated by decades the critical stance known as “reader response.”

This is the idea – in some ways commonsensical, but perhaps subversive to English professors with particular interpretations in mind – that the unique experiences and attitudes that the reader brings to a work of literature are important to the meaning that can be derived from it.

In her 1938 book “Literature as Exploration,” Rosenblatt rejected the “New Criticism” idea that the text stands supreme. In a way, she provided a sophisticated answer to the old conundrum of whether a tree that falls in an uninhabited forest makes a sound. The leaves of a book cannot have a meaning without a reader.

Rosenblatt focused on what she called “the poem,” the meaning for the individual reader that derives from the interaction with the text. She distinguished two modes of reading, for information only and for aesthetic pleasure, and noted that readers often can be located somewhere on a continuum between these modes.

Rosenblatt’s ideas had important implications for teachers of literature. “There is no such thing as a generic reader or a generic literary work,” she wrote. “There are in reality only the potential millions of individual readers of the potential millions of individual literary works.”

The University of Chicago’s Wayne Booth, in the foreword to the fifth edition of “Literature as Exploration,” noted, “I doubt that any other literary critic of this century has enjoyed and suffered as sharp a contrast of powerful influence and absurd neglect as Louise Rosenblatt. She has probably influenced more teachers in their ways of dealing with literature than any other critic.”

A native of Atlantic City, N.J., Rosenblatt attended Barnard College, where she was the roommate of Margaret Mead. They ran with a group of progressives who styled themselves the “Ash Can Cats.” Already the two young women shared ideas about a less autocratic approach to education, writing editorials on the subject for the school paper and inviting to campus such speakers as the philosopher John Dewey, according to a New York University professor, Gordon Pradl.

Rosenblatt earned a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne in 1931 and that same year published her first book, “L’idee de l’art pour l’art,” a study of Victorian literary aesthetics. She returned to America and worked as an instructor at Barnard, then as a professor of literature at Brooklyn College, and finally as a professor of English instruction at NYU. Teaching literature classes to future schoolteachers in the School of Education (rather than the English department) meant that Rosenblatt could model her classes on her own, more democratic theories about reader response, Mr. Pradl said. She headed the doctoral program in English Education until her retirement in 1972.

In 1978, Rosenblatt published “The reader, the text, the poem,” an updated version of her theory that developed the notion of the “transaction” between reader and text and promoted the development of critical thinking as a classroom goal.

In the 1980s, her work began to be rediscovered by a number of scholars working on reader response and “Literature as Exploration” was brought back into print. The book, now in its fifth edition, is among the best-selling works ever published by the Modern Language Association, Mr. Pradl said.

Rosenblatt remained active in pushing for more democratic classroom methods. She purchased a fax machine to help broadcast her opposition toward the No Child Left Behind Act, with its emphasis on testing and other top-down methods. As recently as last November, Rosenblatt addressed an overflow session devoted to her legacy at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English.

“At 100 years of age, she had acquired rock star status, because her ideas and beliefs were just as fresh, as liberating, and as relevant to the challenges that teachers face today as they had been so many years ago,” the executive director of the NCTE, Kent Williamson, said.

Rosenblatt was also honored by the John Dewey Society, which presented her with its Lifetime Achievement award in 2001, and NYU, which gave her the Great Teacher award in 1972.

She lived long enough to see her final book, “Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays,” published on February 1. Even though she published it at Mr. Pradl’s urging, she insisted on writing the introduction herself, he said.

Louise Rosenblatt

Born August 23, 1904, in Atlantic City; died February 8 at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va.; survived by her son, Jonathan, and a granddaughter; predeceased in 1996 by her husband of 63 years, Sidney Ratner, who was an economic historian and philosopher at Rutgers University.