The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response

by Wolfgang Iser

Overview

Iser examines what happens during the reading process, and how it is basic to the development of a theory of aesthetic response, setting in motion a chain of events that depends both on the text and the exercise of certain human faculties.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801823718
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	02/01/1980
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.54(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Wolfgang Iser, who has taught at leading universities in the United States and Europe, is currently professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Constance.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
I.	The Situation: Literary Interpretation: Semantics or Pragmatics?
1.	Partial Art--Total Interpretation	3
	Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet, in Place of an Introduction	3
	The Lingering of the Classical Norm of Interpretation	10
2.	The Rudiments of a Theory of Aesthetic Response	20
	The Reader-Oriented Perspective and Traditional Objections	20
	Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader	27
	Psychoanalytical Theories of Literary Response	38
II.	The Reality of Fiction: A Functionalist Model of the Literary Text
3.	The Repertoire	53
	Starting Point	53
	Speech-Act Theory	54
	Situation-Building	62
	The Referential System of the Repertoire	68
4.	Strategies	86
	The Task of the Strategies	86
	The Old Answer: Deviation	87
	Foreground and Background	92
	The Structure of Theme and Horizon	96
	Variations of the Theme-and-Horizon Structure	99
III.	Phenomenology of Reading: The Processing of the Literary Text
5.	Grasping a Text	107
	Interplay between Text and Reader	107
	The Wandering Viewpoint	108
	Correlatives Produced by the Wandering Viewpoint	118
	Consistency-Building as a Basis for Involvement in the Text as an Event	118
	The Text as an Event	125
	Involvement as a Condition of Experience	129
6.	Passive Syntheses in the Reading Process	135
	Mental Images as a Basic Feature of Ideation	135
	Mental Images Affecting the Reader	139
	Building Images	140
	What Happens to the Reader?	152
IV.	Interaction Between Text and Reader: The Communicatory Structure of the Literary Text
7.	Asymmetry Between Text and Reader	163
	Conditions of Interaction	163
	Ingarden's Concept of Indeterminacy	170
8.	How Acts of Constitution Are Stimulated	180
	Introduction	180
	The Blank as a Potential Connection	182
	The Functional Structure of the Blanks	195
	Historical Differences in the Structure of Interaction	203
	Negation	212
	Negativity	225
	Name and Title Index	233
	Subject Index	236