Postmodern
Wolfgang Iser
1926 – 2007
German philologist (1926–2007)
- Germany
- European Theory & Influence
- Reader-Response Theory
- Literary Theory
About
Wolfgang Iser was a German literary scholar.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).
Life on the Timeline
Major Works
No works have been hung in this gallery yet — the acquisitions team is at work.
Exam Dossier
Most-asked topics
- Reader-Response Theory / Rezeptionsästhetik
- The Constance School (Konstanzer Schule) and Hans Robert Jauss
- The Implied Reader concept
- Theory of Aesthetic Response (The Act of Reading)
- Gaps/Blanks (Leerstellen) and indeterminacy
- The 'wandering viewpoint'
- Literary Anthropology (later phase of Iser's work)
- Text-reader interaction and the 'virtual' literary work
Previous-year themes
- Iser's concept of the 'implied reader' distinguished from real/actual reader
- Reader-response criticism as a school of theory
- Role of 'gaps' or 'blanks' in the reading process
- Iser vs Jauss and the Constance School of reception aesthetics
- The literary work as a 'virtual' entity created in the convergence of text and reader
- Iser's phenomenological approach influenced by Roman Ingarden
- Distinction between reader-response criticism (Iser, Fish) and other schools (New Criticism, Structuralism)
Common confusions
- Confusing Iser with Hans Robert Jauss: Iser's key term is 'implied reader'/'gaps'; Jauss's is 'horizon of expectations'.
- Confusing Iser's 'reader-response' criticism with Stanley Fish's American reader-response criticism (Fish emphasises 'interpretive communities', Iser emphasises the text's own structuring of response).
- Confusing 'implied reader' (a textual construct) with the real/actual empirical reader.
- Mixing up the German publication dates of Der implizite Leser (1972) and Der Akt des Lesens (1976) with their later English translation dates (1974 and 1978).
- Treating Iser as a structuralist or New Critic; he in fact reacts against purely text-immanent approaches by foregrounding the reader's role.
- Confusing Iser's 'gaps/blanks' (textual indeterminacies) with 'defamiliarization' (a Russian Formalist/Shklovsky concept).
Memory tricks
ISER = 'Implied reader Structures Every Reading' — remember the implied reader is a structural feature of the text.
'Act' before 'Implied': remember The Act of Reading (1978) came after The Implied Reader (1974) — chronological order by title length trick.
Constance = Iser + Jauss = 'Co-founders' — both taught at University of Konstanz, so 'Constance School' pairs them.
GAP = 'Gets Active Participation' — gaps/blanks in the text get the reader actively participating.
Iser's Ingarden link: 'IN-garden, IN-determinacy' — both begin with 'In', reminding you Ingarden's concretization idea underlies Iser's indeterminacy/gaps concept.
