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.
Citations
More filters
[...]
TL;DR: This paper argued that a writer writes to be read by individuals, rather than by the public, and that he writes most seriously when he effects changes in consciousness and even behavior, which is the case of a book that redirects consciousness and metamorphoses being.
Abstract: Sometimes it is useful to remind ourselves of some simple facts of literary art, the “minimals” of literary experience. What needs to be established is that a writer writes to be read; that he writes to be read by individuals — “You! Reader!” rather than “the Public”; and that he writes most seriously when he effects changes in consciousness and even behavior. A critic has said that one never goes away unchanged from a reading of Wuthering Heights, and for how many other books could that be said.1 “Didactic” is certainly too weak and limited a term for what is involved, signifying as it does the mere transmission of information from dogmatic Mouth to indifferent Ear. We require something more like “psychokenesis” to describe the active agency of a book that redirects consciousness and metamorphoses being. The presumption of such an active agency has always been there for devotional or satiric literature, the one urging a dynamic orthodoxy, the other inciting a necessary iconoclasm.2 But the question remains for less horatory modes, does an author still have designs on us. What are they? Where did they originate? What is their nature?
2 citations
25 May 2011
TL;DR: The authors explores the contradictory nature of the ghost in Hamlet and shows how Shakespeare seeks to manipulate the reader's response to the play by using contradictions and ambiguities, and how the reader responds to these contradictions and reconstructs a palpable world in the impalpable world of the text.
Abstract: This article explores the contradictory nature of the ghost in Hamlet and shows how Shakespeare seeks to manipulate the reader’s response in Hamlet by using contradictions and ambiguities. The article also explores the ways in which the reader responds to these contradictions and reconstructs a palpable world in the impalpable world of the text. These contradictions compel the reader to participate in the composition of the text and make him keep changing his own approach to the work with the result that the more he reads the play, the deeper he finds himself entrenched in contradictions. As he fails to grasp the logic of events, the reader relates his own world to the text instead of relating the events of the text to his world and recreates his own world. Therefore, he can easily detach himself from the text and let his imagination run loose as the play proves too vague for him to comprehend. In reading Hamlet, the imagination runs wild and travels far beyond the text to an extent where the reader perceives things, which stand not within but utterly outside the text. Eventually, the reality achieved by the reader in the course of reading the play is only the reality which dwells in the innermost recesses of his mind.
2 citations
18 May 2016
TL;DR: In this article, a glose est presentee a titre d'introduction aux relations entre la communaute et les ressources materielles qui constituent les communs urbains, a leur sphere d'information and au lien conceptuel entre les deux niveaux de reconnaissance qui orientent l'argument.
Abstract: Tout en admettant que la pauvrete est abondamment couverte dans la presse grand public canadienne et americaine, le present article soutient que du fait que le journalisme emploie une narration a la troisieme personne, les acteurs des recits sont rarement reconnus comme faisant partie du « public implicite ». Ainsi, les plus demunis ne sont pas en mesure de dialoguer directement avec le journaliste, ce qui mene a une forme de meconnaissance de premier niveau de la part des communs urbains. Cet argument est appuye par des exemples tires d’une etude exhaustive de la couverture journalistique de quotidiens grand public canadiens et americains en 2010. Des suggestions sont formulees quant a la maniere dont le passage de la troisieme a la deuxieme personne influe sur le public implicite et la culture professionnelle du journaliste. Une glose est presentee a titre d’introduction aux relations entre la communaute et les ressources materielles qui constituent les communs urbains, a leur sphere d’information et au lien conceptuel entre les deux niveaux de reconnaissance qui orientent l’argument.
2 citations
01 Jun 2017
2 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita can be read as a persuasive novel, intended to educate Soviet readers who, like the character Ivan Bezdomnyi, are ignorant of history and culture beyond their insulated Soviet reality.
Abstract: Maria Kisel argues that Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita can be read as a persuasive novel, intended to educate Soviet readers who, like the character Ivan Bezdomnyi, are ignorant of history and culture beyond their insulated Soviet reality. Kisel demonstrates how Bulgakov's novel coopts the form and themes of the Soviet satirical feuilleton to explain the virtues of the prerevolutionary cultural realm rooted in the western European intellectual tradition. To render his own cultural perspective accessible, Bulgakov revisits his early feuilletons written for the newspaper Gudok, a category of writings he claimed to disdain. The Master and Margarita demonstrates a complex relationship with the imagined “Soviet reader,“ who is both an object of ridicule and a desired interlocutor. Examining the connection between the Master and Ivan as analogous to the teacher and disciple dynamic between Bulgakov and his own “Soviet readers,” this article offers a new interpretation of this well-loved and much-discussed masterpiece.
2 citations