What is the discourse analysis and literary criticism connection?

[Note: Please see previous post for a full reflection on Neil Mercer's Words and Minds, chapters 1-4.]

Coming at discourse analysis (DA) from the perspective of an English major and high school language arts teacher, my curiosity is naturally piqued by references to "readers," "texts," and "interpretations." 

Mercer does this a lot in Words and Minds. He writes, for example, "'Context' is created anew in every interaction between a speaker and listener or writer and reader" (p. 21). When Mercer refers to written texts (as opposed to utterances) and the "interpretive efforts of the reader," I can't help but think of Louis Rosenblatt's transactional theory, which in my current field of study, reading education, has been described as “a wave in an ocean unto itself” (Ruddell & Unrau, p. 1121).  It's a multidisciplinary perspective that includes comparative literature, philosophy, aesthetics, linguistics, and sociology. This lineage of thought is similar to DA.  Is there a connection?
  
Transactional theory views reader and text as bound in a “total dynamic situation,” where meaning is not extracted from the text but created between reader and text (Ruddell & Unrau, p. 1121). As a preservice English teacher in the early-90s, I came to recognize transactional theory, also referred to as "reader-response," as the primary theory that informed most of the English and language arts instruction I received as both a high school student and undergrad. (Although, I did have one American literature professor who admonished us on the first day of class that we were never to interpret a rabbit in a Robert Frost poem as anything other than a rabbit.)

Last week's class notes and some of the reading indicate that DA draws from literary theory, without making specific mention of Rosenblatt.  Starks and Trinidad, for instance, say DA evolved from linguistic studies, literary criticism, and semiotics (p. 1374).  From what areas of literary criticism does DA draw, and is transactional theory one of them?  I made a cursory pass at the other required texts for the course and could not find a single mention of literary theory, literary criticism, reader-response, or Rosenblatt. 

But there are several parallels.  Take, for instance, Rosenblatt's concept of the transactional paradigm, which borrows from an overall shift in "habits of thinking" over the last century and which casts aside "the old stimulus-response, subject-object, individual-social dualisms" (pp. 1364-1365). Under the new paradigm, "the human being is seen as part of nature, continuously in transaction with an environment -- each one conditions the other" (p. 1365).

Rosenblatt describes conversations, or "linguistic transactions," as "temporal" activities. "Each person has come to the transaction with an individual history, manifested in what has been termed a linguistic-experiential reservoir" (p. 1367).  Readers of Mercer might recognize the "reservoir" as a "frame of reference."

Similar to the way American trial judges reject linguistic interpretations of recorded dialogue in favor of one-shot "common-sense" understandings (Mercer, p. 36), transactional theory has its own critics who view reader-response as too subjective and "anything goes."  

There is a competing school of thought, commonly called "close reading," that presents a text stripped of its contextual layers. During close readings, students are taught to attend only to textual elements (words, images, language devices) as sources of meaning. It may be too pat to suggest that conversation analysis has its own parallel form of literary theory in the close reading, but the similarities are interesting.

References:

Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: how we use language to think together. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library.

Rosenblatt, L.M. (2004). The transactional theory of reading and writing. In R.B. Ruddell & N.J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (5th ed., pp. 1363-1398). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.  

Ruddell, R.B. & Unrau, N.J. (2004). Introduction: Models of reading and writing processes. In R.B. Ruddell & N.J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (5th ed., pp. 1116-1126). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.  

Starks, H. & Trinidad, S.B. (2007). Choose your method: A comparison of phenomenology, discourse analysis, and grounded theory.  Qualitative Health Research, 17(10), 1372-1380.

What is the discourse analysis and literary criticism connection?