Wolfgang Iser,
“Interaction Between Text and Reader,” 1980 (questions by Florence Boos)
What two aspects of a literary work must be studied in order to understand it? (1673)
What distinction does Iser make between the “artistic” and the “aesthetic”? (1674)
What creates a “work” of literature, in Iser's schema? (1674) How does this view cause him to differ with other critics such as Jung or Barthes?
What is the “virtual text,” and how is it created? (1674) How does the reader receive the text?
What ideas of communication propounded by R. D. Laing does he find useful in interpreting the reading process? (1674-76)
What are the limitations of the relationship between the text and its reader? (1675)
What are “gaps” in the text, and how may these be overcome? (1675-77) What does it mean to say that there is an asymmetry between text and reader, and what is the result of this? (1676)
What effect is created by the interaction of a text and reader? (1676)
How is meaning caused by the interaction of the explicit and the implicit, revelation and concealment? (1676)
What does it mean to say that structured blanks in the text serve to stimulate the process of ideation intended by the text? (1677) What are negations in the text, and do they entirely cancel earlier associations or coexist with them? (1677)
How do these gaps occur and how are they bridged? (1677)
What four positions or perspectives does Iser believe are possible in a text? (1677) How does each contribute to the meaning of a text? (1677)
How may these perspectives/functions be subdivided? (e. g. authorial narrator, narrator in text, major and minor characters, subplots, different audiences)
How is the number of blanks increased? (1677)
How are the perspectives of each related in the reading process? (1678) What happens when the reader organizes the positions surrounding the blank? (1678)
How does Iser describe the changes which occur in the process of reading? (1678-79) What distinction does he make between vacancies and blanks, and how do the former also add to the reading process? (1679)
What are some features of his reading of Tom Jones? (1680) Can you apply Iser's terms and theories to other texts?
What does it mean to say that “the vacancy transforms the referential field of the moving viewpoint into a self-regulating structure, . . . which prevents the reciprocal transformaton of textual segments from being arbitrary”? (1681)
How is the reader active in the reading process? (1681) What kinds of texts might prompt more of such involvement?
How does the process of reading appear to the reader? (1682, through a series of images colliding in the mind in the time flow of reading)
To what extent can one say that reading resembles watching a series of pictures or a movie? (1682)
How do Iser's views resemble those of other critics we have read, such as Bakhtin or Jauss? What does he add?
page numbers are from the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2001, 1673-82