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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: This article argued that the critic's concern for 'language' need not be conceived narrowly, even if his concern leads to an intensive examination it can be extended into the largest symbolizations possible.
Abstract: Influenced by the teachings of the so-called New Critics, Hispanists over the years have tended to subject Golden Age plays to close scrutiny in an effort to free literary criticism from the impressionism and emotionalism of the earlier tradition and from the positivistic intentionalism of literaryhistorical scholarship. One cannot deny the contributions of Cleanth Brooks in the practical dissemination of new critical theory. Fundamentally Brooks stressed the impersonality of the critic-an unwillingness to impose one's own personality between the reader and the work-and he also saw a need for technical analysis. The text, he felt, must provide the ultimate sanction for the meaning of the work, but in no sense is a close textual reading to be conceived of as a sort of «verbal piddling.» «Words,» wrote Brooks, «open out into larger symbolizations on all levels-for example, into archetypal symbol, ritual, and myth. The critic's concern for 'language' need not be conceived narrowly, even if his concern leads to an intensive examination it can be extended into the largest symbolizations possible. »(1) Brooks' qualifications notwithstanding, it would appear from the foregoing that New Criticism, philosophically speaking, operates largely in the framework of what has been termed «realism.» Richard E. Palmer, in his book on hermeneutics,(2) makes the following observation about realistic conceptions of perceiving and interpreting in England and America:
5 citations
TL;DR: Howard as discussed by the authors argues for the significance of antebellum evangelical tract tales both as precedents for later best-selling works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and as provocations to consider our critical understandings of literariness.
Abstract: Howard's essay argues for the significance of antebellum evangelical tract tales both as precedents for later best-selling works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and as provocations to consider our critical understandings of literariness. Tract tales belonged to a moment in which discourses of literary aesthetics were bound to a set of questions about whether meaning derived from God, language, or man. The literary was not a mark of the secular, understood as the absence of spiritual concerns, but part of a process of thinking about the relationship of individual will to moral law, biblical precepts, and history. Howard follows the development of ideas about literariness in the antebellum evangelical context by first tracing their roots in a Puritan tradition of representing divine things in language and a Scottish aesthetic tradition that deemed such representations useful. Both of these traditions allowed for a gap between the practical use of language and theories about its significance. It was in this gap that the tract tales emerged-within a cultural context still suspicious of fiction-as representations of what divine truths looked like when lived in the modern world. The essay demonstrates how tales used the developing forms of plot and dialogue to argue for biblical precepts by reading several shorter works as well as Helen Cross Knight's 1846 tract tale Robert Dawson; or, The Brave Spirit. In closing, Howard considers the formal analogies between this work and the century's best-selling novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined a particular aspect of the radio station's history and the fundamental changes in the perception of that audience over time. But their focus was on the imagined audience and not the actual audience.
Abstract: Since 1950, the Israel Defense Forces has operated the Galei Tzahal radio station, which broadcasts to the general public. Over the years, substantial changes have taken place in the station's programming, as it grew from a marginal broadcasting body into a major radio station with high ratings. This study examines a particular aspect of the station's history—its imagined audience—and the fundamental changes in the perception of that audience over time.
5 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The house and the outsider form an archetype of English narrative fiction, as the example of Beowulf shows with the construction of the Hall Heorot waking the monster Grendel who would destroy the house of social order.
Abstract: The paired images of The House and the Outsider form an archetype of English narrative fiction, as the example of Beowulf shows with the celebration of the construction of the Hall Heorot waking the monster Grendel who would destroy the house of social order. Many houses and many outsiders follow this paradigmatic pattern, from Lovelace and Harlowe Place to Heathcliff and Thrushcross Grange to Kinbote with his “window-framed opportunities” to spy on John Shade, and then to invade and occupy his work, Pale Fire. As this last example indicates, in the formal self-consciousness of the novel the symbolic field of the house-outsider comes to include the reader in relation to the house of fiction. When Henry James describes the house of fiction as having “not one window but a million” which were “mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft,” he images the reader as the solitary outsider to narrative form, an inhabitant of the house of the outsider. In the post- 1950 period, cultural, linguistic and critical theory have further described the “architectural capacity” of printed narrative and the place of the reader as outsider. Outsider, house, door, window, mirror—these psychological and archetypal image-concepts help us to understand and apply the critical writings of Sartre, Lacan, Barthes, Iser, deMan, and Silverman. Lacan’s net of language “over the totality of the real,” seen through the mirror, becomes Jameson’s prison-house of language; yet the reader can still observe from without. This study will reveal how these psychoanalytic and post-structural critics and theorists express the formal and thematic interchange of the archetypal pattern, revealing the reader of the novel to be, like the monster in Frankenstein, “the demon at the casement,” observing the creation and destruction of the other who would give him community and entering the house only to destroy.
5 citations
TL;DR: Despite Berthe Marti's warning seventy years ago that questions about the hero of Lucan's Bellum Civile were unlikely to have any defi nitive answer (Marti 1945.343-44), scholars over the last quarter century have engaged in a fi erce debate over Lucan’s depiction of Cato the Younger.
Abstract: Despite Berthe Marti’s warning seventy years ago that questions about the hero of Lucan’s Bellum Civile (hereafter BC) were unlikely to fi nd any defi nitive answer (Marti 1945.343–44), scholars over the last quarter century have engaged in a fi erce debate over Lucan’s depiction of Cato the Younger. Recent critics can, for the most part, be placed into one of two camps. For convenience I call “optimists” those who see Cato as the Stoic and republican hero of the BC and who view the poem as a rallying cry for opposition to the government—or at least the ruling family—established by Julius Caesar.1 This position is at root biographical and based on ancient testimony that Lucan participated in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero after a falling out with his boyhood friend.2 On the other hand are those I term “pessimists.” Drawing on the insights of deconstructionism
5 citations
Cites background from "The Implied Reader: Patterns of Com..."
...…primarily on philological grounds, but the type of approach I am advocating has affi nities with the reader-response criticism proposed, e.g., by Iser 1974.274–94 and Conte 1986.23–31, as well as the reception theory promoted by, e.g., Nauta 1994 and Brockliss, Chaudhuri, Haimson Lushkov, and…...
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