ITTOL - Lecture 4 - Iser, The Reading Process
Wolfgang Iser, in "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition, David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 1002-14), is, like Gadamer, concerned with what happens when we read; Phenomenological Theory considers "the actual text" and "actions involved in responding to that text" (1002).
For him, the act of reading creates a virtual object
The key difference between Iser and Gadamer is that Gadamer believes we can learn to identify our preconceptions (expectations) while Iser asserts we cannot; instead, our own preconceptions become our past experience and the text (the thoughts we are reading) become our present experience and, as he quotes from M. Merkan-Ponty "....there is no longer any way of distinguishing a level of 'a priori' truths and one of factual ones, what the world must necessarily be and what it actually is..." (1006). In our imagination, the world of the text becomes our world and that world constantly shifts as one sentence merges with another creating a pattern that merges with other patterns we have or will formulate while continuing to read. While Gadamer spoke of the text revealing our preconceptions by "pulling us up short", Iser speaks of the text forcing us to use our imaginations by frustrating our expectations. A good literary text makes us work to arrive at a cognitive meaning.
Interestingly, for all these men: Heidegger, Gadamer, Iser, reading or what happens during reading, is essentially a black-box, an alchemical process. They describe what happens when we read but not how we arrive at meaning; they talk of preconceptions and expectations but not textual meaning. For them, it does not appear possible to describe how one goes about discovering the meaning of a text but only how we come to and interact with a text. Heidegger mentions a "primordial knowing", Gadamer an effective history and Iser, a virtual text. As if text + reader = a new domain; 1 + 1 = 3. Something new is born or created by the act of reading and the original text is left unchanged and unrevealed.
For Iser, this is what makes a text a literary text as any text that reveals all is didactic, it can be accepted or rejected but not interpreted; the same can be said of Heidegger and Gadamer. A very odd situation for anyone trying to establish a theory of interpretation.
For him, the act of reading creates a virtual object
The virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination. (1005)Iser's virtual text correlates with Gadamer's effective history and his description of Heidegger's hermeneutic circle , while worded differently than Gadamer's, is essentially the same:
The text provokes certain expectations which in turn we project onto the text in such a way that we reduce the polysemantic possibilities to a single interpretation in keeping with the expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning. (1008)The configurative meaning the reader arrives at is shaped by the actual text, the reader's knowledge of literary themes, techniques, and the social and historical contexts (similar to Gadamer's tradition) and, like, Gadamer, he affirms that one cannot arrive at the absolute truth of a text:
While expectations may be continually modified, and images continually expanded, the reader will still strive, even if unconsciously, to fit everything together in a consistent pattern. (1007)The consistent pattern we strive for changes with every reading as we make choices based on our expectations and these choices formulate the "unformulated in the text" (1010) in such a way that the second reading is never the same as the first, the third never the same as the first and second, and so on for each reading.
The key difference between Iser and Gadamer is that Gadamer believes we can learn to identify our preconceptions (expectations) while Iser asserts we cannot; instead, our own preconceptions become our past experience and the text (the thoughts we are reading) become our present experience and, as he quotes from M. Merkan-Ponty "....there is no longer any way of distinguishing a level of 'a priori' truths and one of factual ones, what the world must necessarily be and what it actually is..." (1006). In our imagination, the world of the text becomes our world and that world constantly shifts as one sentence merges with another creating a pattern that merges with other patterns we have or will formulate while continuing to read. While Gadamer spoke of the text revealing our preconceptions by "pulling us up short", Iser speaks of the text forcing us to use our imaginations by frustrating our expectations. A good literary text makes us work to arrive at a cognitive meaning.
Interestingly, for all these men: Heidegger, Gadamer, Iser, reading or what happens during reading, is essentially a black-box, an alchemical process. They describe what happens when we read but not how we arrive at meaning; they talk of preconceptions and expectations but not textual meaning. For them, it does not appear possible to describe how one goes about discovering the meaning of a text but only how we come to and interact with a text. Heidegger mentions a "primordial knowing", Gadamer an effective history and Iser, a virtual text. As if text + reader = a new domain; 1 + 1 = 3. Something new is born or created by the act of reading and the original text is left unchanged and unrevealed.
For Iser, this is what makes a text a literary text as any text that reveals all is didactic, it can be accepted or rejected but not interpreted; the same can be said of Heidegger and Gadamer. A very odd situation for anyone trying to establish a theory of interpretation.