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The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
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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Assemblage theory and the uses of classical reception: the case of Aristotle Knowsley’s Oedipus
TL;DR: The authors used the example of an Oedipus play written by Aristotle Knowsley sometime between 1596 and 1603 to ask whether thinking about what we more often call "receiving texts" as "assemblages" could offer the study of classical reception a way to confront the restrictions placed upon it by the linearity of literary history.
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Why does classical reception need disability studies
TL;DR: The authors argue that classical reception needs to look to disability studies for a methodology that will allow the field to begin to theorize the role of the reader in the perpetuation of the ideology of ableism and ideas of bodily normativity.
Book ChapterDOI
James Joyce and the Difference of Language: ‘sound sense’; or ‘tralala’ / ‘moocow’: Joyce and the anathema of writing
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argued that infancy is fundamentally inimical to writing, and that it would further follow that infancy would be inimically also to representation in language or even to representation as such.
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Genre(s) in the Making: Diction, Audience and Text in the Old English Seafarer
TL;DR: The Seafarer's problematic structure has generated as much critical disagreement per verse as any work in the Anglo-Saxon poetic canon as discussed by the authors. And yet almost all editors and commentators involved in its study have heaped one enthusiastic evaluation after another on this their bugbear, professing to sense, however individualistically, something of enduring quality.
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The Brainless Virtuoso as an Existential Thinker: Čechovʼs Poetics of Contrariety in ‘Dreams’
TL;DR: In this paper, a study of Chekhov's poetics of contrariety is presented, which is based on the notion of Cartesian rationalism, which postulates that theoretical thinking precedes practical living.