The Act of Reading

A Theory of Aesthetic Response

By: Wolfgang Iser

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Paperback | 15 April 1980

At a Glance

Paperback
224 Pages

Age
22+

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.5 x 1.6

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By defining what happens during the act of reading, that is, how aesthetic experience is initiated, develops, and functions, Iser's book provides the first systematic framework for assessing the communicatory function of a literary text within the context from which it arises. It is an important work that will appeal to those interested in the reading process, aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and basic theoretical aspects of the novel. Book jacket.

Industry Reviews

""A splendid theoretical companion to Iser's The Implied Reader. The earlier book drew much attention for its reader-centered practical criticism of narrative fiction from Bunyan on. The new volume explains Iser's phenomenological technique... This book belongs in every serious, up-to-date literature collection.""

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Preface	p. ix
The Situation: Literary Interpretation: Semantics or Pragmatics?
Partial Art--Total Interpretation	p. 3
Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet, in Place of an Introduction	p. 3
The Lingering of the Classical Norm of Interpretation	p. 10
The Rudiments of a Theory of Aesthetic Response	p. 20
The Reader-Oriented Perspective and Traditional Objections	p. 20
Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader	p. 27
Psychoanalytical Theories of Literary Response	p. 38
The Reality of Fiction: A Functionalist Model of the Literary Text
The Repertoire	p. 53
Starting Point	p. 53
Speech-Act Theory	p. 54
Situation-Building	p. 62
The Referential System of the Repertoire	p. 68
Strategies	p. 86
The Task of the Strategies	p. 86
The Old Answer: Deviation	p. 87
Foreground and Background	p. 92
The Structure of Theme and Horizon	p. 96
Variations of the Theme-and-Horizon Structure	p. 99
Phenomenology of Reading: The Processing of the Literary Text
Grasping a Text	p. 107
Interplay between Text and Reader	p. 107
The Wandering Viewpoint	p. 108
Correlatives Produced by the Wandering Viewpoint	p. 118
Consistency-Building as a Basis for Involvement in the Text as an Event	p. 118
The Text as an Event	p. 125
Involvement as a Condition of Experience	p. 129
Passive Syntheses in the Reading Process	p. 135
Mental Images as a Basic Feature of Ideation	p. 135
Mental Images Affecting the Reader	p. 139
Building Images	p. 140
What Happens to the Reader?	p. 152
Interaction Between Text and Reader: The Communicatory Structure of the Literary Text
Asymmetry Between Text and Reader	p. 163
Conditions of Interaction	p. 163
Ingarden's Concept of Indeterminacy	p. 170
How Acts of Constitution Are Stimulated	p. 180
Introduction	p. 180
The Blank as a Potential Connection	p. 182
The Functional Structure of the Blanks	p. 195
Historical Differences in the Structure of Interaction	p. 203
Negation	p. 212
Negativity	p. 225
Name and Title Index	p. 233
Subject Index	p. 236
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

The Act of Reading

A Theory of Aesthetic Response

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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