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The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
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TLDR
Iser as mentioned in this paper analyzed major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray to Joyce and Beckett, and provided a framework for a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses.Abstract:
Like no other art form, the novel confronts its readers with circumstances arising from their own environment of social and historical norms and stimulates them to assess and criticize their surroundings. By analyzing major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray to Joyce and Beckett, renowned critic Wolfgang Iser here provides a framework for a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses. Iser's focus is on the theme of discovery, whereby the reader is given the chance to recognize the deficiencies of his own existence and the suggested solutions to counterbalance them. The content and form of this discovery is the calculated response of the reader -- the implied reader. In discovering the expectations and presuppositions that underlie all his perceptions, the reader learns to "read" himself as he does the text.read more
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Dissertation
Neither Lye Nor Romance: Narrativity in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers
TL;DR: Halperin this article examines the ways in which the Old Bailey Sessions Papers operate as narrative and are given meaning through specific intertextual relationships with a variety of factual, fictional, and legal texts of the seventh and eighteenth centuries.
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The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser's Literary Theory
TL;DR: The reader is not so much radically upbraided, as simply returned to himself or herself as a more thoroughly liberal ''iiberal humanist'' as discussed by the authors, and the reader's reading subject is described in the language of personal indulgence: ''So from a theory which in its beginnings appcared to promise movemcnt in a historicist direction, we elld with a theol)' ccntcrcd in the delights of the personal reading su~jeet''.
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Complexity and Foregrounding: In the Eye of the Beholder?
TL;DR: For instance, Southwick et al. as mentioned in this paper found that complex texts would be rated higher on a second reading than on a first reading; the opposite was predicted for the text with the lowest complexity.
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From Psychology to Poetics: Aging as a Literary Process
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify points of intersection between narrative gerontology and literary theory that illuminate a process central to what they call a poetics of aging, reading the self, and speculate on how, by framing such concepts as meaning, memory, and time in narrative terms, Gerontology can move toward a more comprehensive, more nuanced understanding of what aging entails.