A STUDY ON WOLFGANG ISER: THE ACT OF READING AND ARTISTIC RESPONSE BY READERS

Wolfgang Iser (b. 1926) is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of
Constance, in Germany, and has taught at many universities in Europe and America. He and his
colleague at Constance, Hans Robert Jauss, are the well- known exponents of a distinctively
German school of modern criticism known as ‘Reception Theory’. It was developed in Germany
concurrently with the changes in French &Anglo- American criticism from a structuralist focus on
the literary text to a post structuralist view of the text as a site for the formation & proliferation of
meaning. It owes much to the philosophical tradition of phenomenology that started with Husserl,
especially the aesthetics of the scholar Roman Ingarden and the hermeneutics of the German
philosopher Hans -Georg Gadamer – a custom which emphasized the focus of consciousness in all
investigations of explanation. In his essay he explained the role of reader and scope of creativity
for reader for his own illusions, interpretations. This manuscript aims attention at Wolfgang Iser’s
phenomenological access to reader acknowledgement, procreation of meaning & description of
readers. This approach concentrates on the reader & his role in the making of an erudite attempt.
The text does not subsist without the reader. Reader is an efficacious contributor in the
production of elucidation.

INTRODUCTION

This approach examines, perceives reader’s task in production of explanation, elucidation. Text
itself means nothing until someone reads it. Reading is an affair of secluded distinctiveness. This
paper undertakes to contribute a comprehensive interpretation of Wolfgang Iser and quests into
his Reception Theory in the following seven facets the elongation of signification, the indicative
reader model; the functionalist model of text; performing the intentionality of reading; literature
& communication: interaction between text and reader; Iser’s literary anthropology; and reception
theory meets cognitive criticism.

Reader-response critics of all imaginative conversions agree that, at least to some reasonable
degree, the meanings of a text are the “production”, fructification or “explanation”, definition of
the individual reader, hence that there is no one correct meaning or creation for all readers either
of the linguistic (phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactical ) parts or of the artistic whole of a
text. French structuralist criticism, as Jonathan Culler said in Structuralist Poetics (1975),” is
substantially a theory of reading “that targets to “specify define, determine how we go about
making perception of texts.”(pp. viii, 128). Reader -response criticism coincides with the “post –
structuralist “view of the text as a side for a seemingly endless proliferation and subversion of
meaning. “. Unlike Reader – response criticism, post structuralism does not assume “that all
perception necessarily entails interpretation. “(Payne 456). The meaning of a text is never stable
because it is constantly changing. Words only have meaning in relation to the other words around
them. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.
Fish analyses, interprets and averts, the role of the proficient” discursive association” of academic
(erudite) critics in classical studies; he also augments his views of literary apprehension into the
dominion of legitimate interpretation.

In augmentation to the captions considered in this essay, the following are remarkable epitomes
of reader -response criticism: Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin : The Reader in “paradise
lost”(1967);Norman Holland, The Dynamics of literary Response (1968) and Five Readers Reading
(1975);Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (1974) and The Act of Reading : A Theory of Aesthetic
Response (1978). Roland Barthes bring forward the famous announcement in “The Death of the
author” in the 1960‟s. Iser’s work in the realm of reception theory positions as his most eloquent
contribution to literary theory. The experience of Iser’s own quest for answers was the
condemnation that the literary content as an instance for the creative had a function radically
discrepant from other types of memoir and that in the text- reader relationship too much had
been taken for- granted, or not taken into account at all, by traditional criticism. “A text should be
understood as a reaction to the thought systems which it has chosen &incorporated in its own
response.” (Iser, 1978, p. 72) The literary text always take on a range of accessible intimations,
According to Iser’s opinion. According to Tompkins: Iser’s Intentionality of the reading procedure,
with its displacement from anticipation to reminiscence, it’s making & unmaking of gestalts, like
prince’s taxonomy of readers & narrates, supports critics with a new repertoire of discursive
devices and thus leads to light a new set of facts for surveillance and delineation.

WOLFGANG ISER: THE READING PROCESS

Iser’s work has affinities with the so-called Geneva school of phenomenological criticism, whose
doyen, Gorges Paulette, he discusses at the end. Iser is less „mystical‟, more „scientific‟ than the
Geneva critics in his manner of literary explanation. Indeterminacy is the way in which „gaps‟ or
„blanks‟ in literary texts accelerate the reader to form meanings which would not otherwise come
into existence. Author gives the text which is loosely threaded & it has many gaps reader has great
scope for creativity, for illusions & interpretations. (Positive/ negative). His phenomenological
theory of art lays full emphasize on the fact that in acknowledging a literary work, one must take
into consideration not only literary text but also& in equal measure the actions, works included in
reacting to that work. This Roman In garden confronts the structure of the text with the ways in
which it can be realized. Literary work has two poles -artistic & the aesthetic. Artistic refers to the
text created by author and aesthetic refers to the realization accomplished by the reader. So a
literary work cannot be completely identical with the text or with the realization of the text, but in
fact must lie halfway between two. It is the virtuality of the text that gives rise to its dynamic
nature. Laurence Sterne in „Tristram Shandy‟: no author, who understands the just boundaries of
decorum and good – breeding, would presume to think all. The truest respect which you can pay
to the reader „s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to
imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. Sterne’s conception of a literary text is that it is something
like an arena in which reader and author participate in a game of the imagination. Reader while
acknowledging the interpretations between past, present & future, actually causes the text to
show its potential abundance of connections. A good text always give you feeling about
verisimilitude. The process of anticipation & retrospection in any way does not flourish in a
smooth flow. Ingarden gives a prominent significance:

“once we are immersed in the flow of Satzdenken ; we are ready, after completing the thought of
one sentence, to think about the „continuation „, also in the form of a sentence- and that is, in the
form of a sentence that connects up with the sentence we have just thought through. . . . This
hiatus is linked with a more or less active surprise, or with indignation. We may say that the
reading process is selective, and the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its individual
realizations. The reader may link the different phases of the text together, it will always be the
process of anticipation & retrospection that leads to the formation of the virtual dimension. The
literary text acts as a kind of mirror which reflects different interpretations, assumptions. In his
essay, Iser has talked about time-sequence, paradoxical situation, recognition, indeterminacy,
escapism, illusion, consistency, verisimilitude, recreation, tension, conception, deciphering, gestalt
of the text, dialectical structure of reading, virtual dimensions, text & imagination, virtual
dimensions, Illusion forming & illusion breaking, irony, repertoire, deciphering, willing suspension
of disbelief, pre intentions, imagination, anticipation, retrospection, recognition . While reading
Tom Jones, they may never have had a clear conception of what the Hero actually looks like, but
on seeing the film, some may say, ‟That’s not how I imagined him. ‟The point here is that the
reader of Tom Jones is able to visualize the hero virtually for himself, & so his imagination senses
the vast number of possibilities; the moment these possibilities are narrowed down to one
complete & immutable picture. . . In this reading process, we have observed three important
aspects that form the basis of the relationship between reader and text; process of anticipation &
retrospection, the consequent unfolding of the text as a living event, and the resultant impression
of lifelikeness. Paulette thinks regarding this –“, such is the characteristic condition of every work
which I summon back into existence by placing consciousness at its disposal. I give it not only
existence, but awareness of Existence. “The writer leaves a gap for reader’s imagination. Text
makes reader to interpret, to fill the gaps & blanks by evolving religion. Real thinking is done by
reader. Reader’s interpretations and assimilations are most important than author’s writing.
According to Frantz fanon (linguistics) – “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The
segment on which the view point focuses in each particular moment becomes the theme. The
theme of one moment becomes the background against which the next segment takes on its
actuality, and so on. Whenever a segment becomes a theme, the previous one must lose its
thematic relevance & be turned into a marginal thematically vacant position, which can be &
usually is occupied by the reader so that he may focus on the new thematic segment.

“Reader response in literary theory gestates a literary text as incomplete which accomplishes its
plenitude only when it is read. Iser says that some elements of text are indeterminate & their
meaning must be worked out by the reader. ” - Habib (728). Language manifests itself in the forms
used to express meanings & it has inherent possibilities which are exploited by its users.

The contemporary critic of theorist Wolfgang Iser studies the phenomenological form of the
reading process introduced by Roman Ingarden. However, there are enormous differences amidst
the two. Ingarden just begets a general confession of the reading process; whereas Iser augments
his study and administers his theory to many distinct literature works, even prose fiction.
According to Iser, any literary text is a product of the writer’s phenomenological deeds and, it
partly commands the reader’s response, however It involves a great accord of “gaps “ or
“indeterminate elements . In order to apprehend much better, the reader must take a progressive
assistance &bid to fill in these apertures creatively, with the obsessed information in the text
before him. The inclusive understanding experience thus emerges an evolving process of
contemplation, grievance, reminiscence, reconstruction & compensation. Iser makes a difference
amidst the inferred reader & the absolute reader. The implied reader is constituted within the
text, and he is contemplated to acknowledge in many distinct ways to the “response - inviting
structures” of the text. The actual reader, however, with his own peculiar acquaintances
amalgamated little by little, his reactions veritably are unavoidably and sequentially changed &
reassembled. The repertoire considers a dual capacity in Iser’s model:

“It reshapes familiar schemata to form a background for the process of communication, &it
provides a general framework within which the message or meaning of the text can be organized.
“- (Iser, 1978, p. 1) “They incorporate the immanent structure of the text & the acts of
comprehension thereby triggered off in the reader.”- (Iser, 1978, p. 86) “After all, the ultimate
function of the strategies is to defamiliarize the familiar.”- (Iser, 1978, p. 87). Lois Tyson writes:
Reader- response theorists share two beliefs:

(1). that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature & (2. That
readers do not quietly absorb the meaning bestowed to them by an objective literary text, rather
they actively make the meaning they find in literature. With retrospection, only more intricate
associations can be formed “the reader in stabilizing these intercourses between past, existent &
future literally considers the text to acknowledge its potential abundance of connections.”
Husserl’s observation draws our attention to literary poles that plays a significant part in the
process of reading, originally constructive process is inspired by pre- intentions. They also form an
expectation in this regard. Husserl calls this expectation „pre intentions. „ A literary text must be
conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s imagination in the task of working things
out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when creative & instinctive. According to George
Steiner (linguistics) – “when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way
of looking at the world. “

It is an anti- realist theory of literature for in the realist text, the reader has rarely to recover or re-
experience, where the reader is an emulative reader. It is like a sapient text to a common sensical
reading under the assumption that a text has a single meaning of which Iser objects saying that
meaning of a text is not a fixed, definable entity but a dynamic phenomenon. When, for instance,
we say that a literary work is good or bad, we are making a value judgment. . . objective evidence
for subjective alternatives does not make the value judgment itself detached but merely
objectifies the preference.

Virginia Woolf’s in her study of Jane Austen: „Jane Austen is this a mistress of much deeper
emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she
offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind. ‟
Walter pater once observed: „ For to the grave reader words too are grave; and the ornamental
word, the figure, the accessory form or color or reference, is rarely content to die to thought
precisely at the right moment, but will inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long “ brainwave” behind
it of perhaps quite alien association. “ so in reading there are two levels-, ” the alien „me‟ and the
real, virtual‟ me- which are never completely cut off from each other. Philosophically skeptical
approach to the potentiality of coherent meaning in language, enunciated by the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida in a series of works have printed in 1967 and approved by several
leading literary critics either in United States from early 1970‟s &onwards. The readers claim is
that the imperative westward attitude or deliberation, cogitation has aimed to setup the grounds
of credence & verisimilitude by dejecting the limitless fluidity of a language. This “logo -centric”
tradition caught some outright or guarantee/meaning which could counterpoise the uncertainties
/assurances through a set of “violent echelons” prevailing a central term over a peripheral one:
nature over culture, male over female and most dominantly speech over writing. The term”
Differance” coined by the French Theorist of Deconstruction Jacques Derrida, suggesting the
French verb “differer” which can mean either “to differ” or “to defer” implying postponement.
Structuralism looks at the relationships between various elements within the self-contained, well
organised structure of a text in order to understand the ways by which the text produces a
meaning. proairetic (way to read a text), Hermeneutic (interpretation after reading). It focuses on
various elements of text -voice, character, setting & their combinations. Jonathan Culler says –“,
there should be distinctiveness of literary structures, we have to see narrative is constituted of
developed cultures. ” Everybody writes same thing but there is difference in nationality &
language according to their own ideas, intellect, emotions & state of mind.

Northrop Frye says “, Illusion is fixed or definable & reality is at best understood as its negation.”

The world presented by literary texts is formed of what Ingarden has called intentionale
Satzkorrelate: “Sentences link up in different ways to form more complex units of meaning that
show a very varied structure giving rise to such entities as a short story, a novel, a dialogue, a
drama, a scientific theory . . . . . If this complex finally forms a literary work, I call the whole sum of
sequent intentional sentence correlatives the „world presented „ in the work. The „picturing‟ that
is done by our imagination is only one of the activities through which we form the „gestalt „ of a
literary text. The „gestalt „is not the true meaning of the text; at best it is a configurative meaning.

WOLFGANG ISER: “THE INTERACTION BETWEEN TEXT AND READER

Post- structuralism therefore is not a relinquishment of arrangement but rather a analytical

contemplation upon its dynamics. “(Payne 437.) It combines aspects of reader – response criticism
and deconstructive criticism. Deconstruction affirms the arbitrariness of language most strikingly
by exposing the contradictions in a discourse. (Lynn 112). The text’s structure changes when the
reader refers to these other words. Gaps are created by contradictions & ambiguities within a text.
Gaps creates an unstable meaning; and show the unity and division of the text. According to Iser
(1679) “blanks refer to the suspended connectability in the text . . . .” The structure of the literary
text guides the reader’s interpretation which is constantly being modified. Interpretation is the
result of the dynamic interaction between the text & the reader. The combination of the two is
what Iser calls the “virtual text”. The virtual text lies between the artistic pole (the author’s text) &
the aesthetic pole (the reader’s interpretation). Interpersonal experience is the isolated
experience we have of each other in our minds, but we cannot fully experience what others
experience. Thus the gaps in are experiences are filled in by dyadic interaction. Textual Experience
does not allow oral communication and interchange of ideas, meaning there is no dyadic
interaction. Thus, there are doubtful gaps between the reader and the text. Gaps & blanks are the
most important elements of post-structuralism. Communion of gaps: The text – reader
relationship alters when gaps between what is “revealed” are connected. Blanks leave open the
connection between the textual perspectives, and so spur the reader into coordinating these
perspectives and patterns . . . . They induce the reader to perform basic operations within the text.
(Iser 1677). “Negations” adjure accustomed knowledge and then cancel it out. The cancelled
knowledge still “remains in view” as the reader modifies his /her interpretation. ” It makes
possible the organization of a referential field.” – (Iser 1678).

Rosenblatt „s reader response Transactional Theory (1938, 1978) proposes that : Rosenblatt : the
reader, rather than the text, dictates stance ., readers‟ attention narrows, any text can be read
either way, when reading any one text, readers transfer along a perpetuity from the aesthetic to
efferent stance .

“Literature is the means of promoting critical thinking and multiple perspectives, (given that)
readers bring a wealth of emotions, experiences & knowledge to a reading that, in turn, provoke
associations with the words, images and ideas in the text. (Rosenblatt 2). Readers are thinkers.
They build up meanings, ideas to be retained.

According to Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange land (linguistics) – “Long human words (the
longer the better) were easy, unmistakable and rarely changes their meanings . . . but short words
were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.

During the late 1970‟s and 1980‟s, reader response criticism, inveigled in part by tendencies in
other disciplines, especially behaviorism and psychoanalytical theories expanded to include a
study of the reader as subject a combination of various social conventions, defined and positioned
socially by his environment. This shift from the relationship between reader and text and their
respective impact, to a focus on self-knowledge and observation has been epitomized in
compilations, accommodating Jane Tompkins’s Reader- response Criticism ; from formalism to
post structuralism (1980). Recent works by critics including David Bleich, Norman Holland and
Stanley Fish, have also augmented the cynosure of reader -response theory to include legitimacy &
importance of interpretations commanded by the association or environments colonized by the
readers. This is a departure from their prevenient held position, which asserted the supremacy of
relationship between reader and text, disregarding the environment. Fish, in peculiar laid out his
theories regarding interpretive strategies, which he stated are shared by “illuminative localities “in
several essays during the 1980‟s and later. In his study of the history of reader – response
criticism, Terence R. Wright explains that -

While the field has extended its lines of demarcation to constitute copious accessions, the advent
reader-response critics have with the act of reading remains consistent. What has commutated is
the realization these theorists now have of the ways in which environment, history, politics, and
even sexual acclimatization can effect a reader response to a text. This augmentation yardstick has
led many latest critics to refer to this type of hyper critical theory as reader – oriented criticism
rather than reader – response criticism.

This theory has some limitations also –1. Not every apprehension, perception, assimilation may be
authentic, logical. 2. Students can also surpass (outstrip) the interpretation levels. 3. Students can
also disharmonize & altercate with each other’s interpretations.
CONCLUSION

Even the author’s meaning is no barring. The prerogative of the text must be awaited upon. Iser’s
work has come in for a good deal of colloquy, Stanley fish, for example, advances rejections to his
defiance to take a firm stand and his covenant on several issues. On question of determinacy, Fish
says that the blanks in a text do not exist independent of reader; nor do they exist prior to act of
interpretation. Interacting with the text and interacting with the world are activities which are
mediated. In the same way, there is nothing totally indeterminate, since all the time the reader
operates within an interpretative framework. There is no such thing as something being given, and
the reader’s contribution. But each interpretative strategy is valid only within a particular system
of intelligibility.