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The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett

Wolfgang Iser
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.

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Book ChapterDOI

Of Archons and Amateurs: Commissioned Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss three documentary films from Brazil as forms of commissioned filmmaking, where professional filmmakers engage untrained individuals to obtain locally produced images and sounds (from prison, streets and homes, respectively).

Gender, Sexuality and Textuality in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body

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TL;DR: In this article, a reading of Jeanette Winterson's novel written on the body is presented, and three major areas regarding to which the text is analysed: the textual ambiguity of the rhetorical voice, the li...

The reader in/of the alexandria quartet

TL;DR: Durrell summarized The Alexandria Quartet as both a writer's writer and a reader's writer as discussed by the authors, concluding that "the whole business of the four books, apart from other things, shows the way an artist grows up." And many other critics have noted how thoroughly self-conscious the work is, in part, stocked with a large cast of invented writers whose own artistic preoccupations call attention to those of the fiction in which they appear.
Book ChapterDOI

Imaginary Burglars: English Studies and the Hinterlands of Thought

TL;DR: This article made a case that literary pedagogy sought to cultivate its own mythopoeic powers, and a form of spiritual authority which would restore transactions between the social, imitative mind and an ‘authentic' inner world of troubled memory and conflict.
Journal ArticleDOI

What’s So Special about Appeal? Drawing the Aesthetic/Nonaesthetic Distinction in Readers’ Advisory

TL;DR: The concept of appeal functions as a central tool in the practice of contemporary readers' advisory (RA). But despite its prevalence in RA education and service, appeal has been criticized for its lack of conceptual specificity as discussed by the authors .