Book•
The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
01 Jan 1974-
TL;DR: 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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TL;DR: The authors examined the reader-response journals of an English learner who read two works of historical fiction in his English Language Development class at a public high school in California, and found that the journals written in English functioned as a window into the EL's experiences and as an avenue toward understanding various perspectives.
Abstract: This study examines the reader-response journals of an English learner (EL) who read two works of historical fiction in his English Language Development class at a public high school in California. Locating this study within the tradition of research on reader response, it investigates how the EL constructs his own individualized meaning by reflecting on his personal history in interacting with the literature and how he reconciles multiple perspectives on the historical events described in the novels vis-a-vis his prior knowledge. The findings suggest that the journals written in English functioned as a window into the EL’s experiences and as an avenue toward understanding various perspectives. The study exemplifies how reader-response journals, in conjunction with literary course materials, can facilitate the process of ELs’ language learning and deepen the ways in which they view and read the world. Thus, reader-response journals serve as a cultivating force to help ELs constitute their identiti...
8 citations
Cites background from "The Implied Reader: Patterns of Com..."
...Responding against these perspectives, scholars like Fish (1980), Iser (1974), and Rosenblatt (1978, 1988) emphasized the essential and active role readers play in comprehending literary works – a focus on readers’ subjectivities that led to the establishment of reader-response theories (Tyson,…...
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TL;DR: In this article, Agee tried to create prose to make readers feel what it's like to pick cotton through laborious descriptions of the hands cramping, the strain on a bent back, and the feel of sweat on a working body, Agee hoped to transfer the actual sensations of picking to the reader.
Abstract: In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee tried to create prose to make readers feel what it's like to pick cotton. Through laborious descriptions of the hands cramping, the strain on a bent back, and the feel of sweat on a working body, Agee hoped to transfer the actual sensations of picking to the reader. His rhetorical experiments stemmed from his desire to produce a "credible language" for representing the "plainness and iterativeness" of a sharecropper's work to a middle-class audience (Letters 115, Praise 320). Agee claimed that he wanted to make the sharecropper's experience "so real to you who read of it, that it will stand and stay in you as the deepest and most iron anguish and guilt of your existence that you are what you are, and that she is what she is, and that you cannot for one moment exchange places with her" (Praise 321). The vast gulf in experience between readers and subjects made identifying with the croppers virtually impossible, according to Agee, a problem compounded by the limitations of language. Despite all of his experiments in representation, Agee acknowledged that the sharecroppers in his documentary book remained "hermetically sealed away from identification with everyday 'reality"' (Praise 240). For Agee, identification was both an aesthetic and a political problem: it was a phenomenological effect of language with social and political consequences. Moreover, Agee worked within a form-the documentary book'-which expressly encouraged middle-class readers to identify with the subjects represented in order to spur social change.2 If authors could make readers identify with the people they depicted, the thinking went, they might promote action to
8 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 1994
TL;DR: In this paper, a theoretical and philosophical discussion of the nature of poetic discourse is presented, with a subsequent discussion of pedagogic practice and a selection of protocols, whose effectiveness is illustrated by asubjective selection.
Abstract: This thesis is a theoretical and philosophical discussion of the nature
of poetic discourse, with a subsequent discussion of pedagogic practice
arising from the views expressed, whose effectiveness is illustrated by a
subjective selection of protocols. The central claim is that the peculiar
nature of poetic discourse is inherently dramatic, since it internalizes
'voices'. Therefore, to achieve a total experience of poetry the reader needs
to engage his own schemata in their body/thought entirety. This implies that
he has not to limit himself to the 'sounding' of the 'voices' he achieves in
the text just within his 'inward ear', but he has to 'embody' them, 'inhabit'
them within a 'physical space of representation', letting them inter-act with
other readers' embodiments. In so doing, the reader becomes an Acting Reader.
The contribution this thesis offers to research on Discourse Analysis
and Literary Stylistics consists in recognizing the vocal, 'physical'
dimension of poetic texts (a dimension which is often neglected) as a way of
achieving a more thorough personal awareness of the poetic experience.
Accordingly, I elaborate a principled pedagogic approach to poetic language
through the reader's use of drama techniques with the aim to demonstrate how
it can be relevant in the teaching of poetry to either Ll or L2 students at
both High School and University levels.
So that in the theoretical part (Chapters 1-4) I place my rationale
against a context of 'new-critic', semiotic, and deconstructionist approaches
to literary theory and teaching methodology to demonstrate how they imply only
a one-way communication of a pre-established interpretation (Chapters 1-2).
Then I describe the first 'two phases' of the reader's activation of
'familiarizing' top-down and 'defamiliarizing' bottom-up strategies in his
attempt to authenticate the peculiar structural and semantic arrangement of
the poetic text (Chapter 3). Eventually, these two top-down/bottom-up phases
come to merge during the final interactive phase (Chapter 4) in which I
postulate a group of acting readers' multiple 'embodied' poetic discourses -
controlled by the same poetic text - inter-acting in a representational
'physical' space to recreate selves, schemata, and iconic contexts.
This theory systematically informs the practical part of my research
(Chapters 5-9) consisting in 'dialogic' classroom operationalizations of each
of the three phases. I pragmatically demonstrate (through protocol analysis)
that to be conceptually receptive to poetic language the student/acting-reader
needs to be physically prepared to be receptive to it. Stylistics, thus, is
meant as the analysis of the acting reader's own responses, not as the
analysis of the text (Chapter 5). I first provide 'top-down' affective
evidence that the nature of schemata is essentially 'bodily', as the body is
the experiential way to conceptualization (Chapter 6). Then, I show
students/acting-readers' 'bottom-up' cognitive embodiments of
ideational/interpersonal 'voices' in both macro- and micro-communication
(Chapter 7), to finally describe groups of acting readers' pragmatic
achievements of 'interactive' dramatic embodiments of collective poetic
discourses (Chapter 8). I conclude (Chapter 9) by indicating possible
theoretical and pedagogic developments of my rationale.
8 citations
01 Jul 2020
TL;DR: Proteus as mentioned in this paper presents players with a new randomly generated island to explore, accompanied by a procedurally generated ambient soundtrack that incorporates both harmonic textures and melodic motives, and abstract musical representations of environmental sounds.
Abstract: Each playthrough of Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus (2013) presents players with a new, randomly generated island to explore. This unstructured exploration is accompanied by a procedurally generated ambient soundtrack that incorporates both harmonic textures and melodic motives, and abstract musical representations of environmental sounds. In the absence of clearly defined goals—except to progress through four distinct “seasons” of the game—the player's relationship to the soundtrack becomes a core gameplay element, and a playthrough of Proteus becomes, among other things, a kind of improvised performance art.
Viewed from this perspective, Proteus's combination of free exploration and chance strongly evokes ideas from mid-twentieth-century musical modernism, including the graphic scores of Cardew and Cage and the “mobile form” works of Stockhausen and Ligeti. Proteus further complicates analysis by concealing the mechanisms that produce particular musical fragments and by eliding the roles of listener and player/performer. This article examines the tensions inherent in the complementary actions of playing/performing Proteus and listening to/analyzing it, and argues that the game challenges the distinctions between creator, performer, and observer by vividly embodying the most deeply ingrained metaphors of music analysis.
8 citations
TL;DR: Curtis' historical fiction uses naive character narration to engage readers and create double narratives that present stories about racism and racial violence both truthfully and safely for potential readers of differing levels of readiness to grasp distressing historical realities as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Christopher Paul Curtis's historical fiction uses naive character narration to engage readers and create double narratives that present stories about racism and racial violence both truthfully and safely for potential readers of differing levels of readiness to grasp distressing historical realities.
8 citations