Reader-Response Criticism | Gabriele Schwab (essay date winter 2000)
Gabriele Schwab (essay date winter 2000)
SOURCE: Schwab, Gabriele. “‘If Only I Were Not Obliged to Manifest’: Iser's Aesthetics of Negativity.”1 New Literary History 31, no. 1 (winter 2000): 73-89.
[In the following essay, Schwab explores connections between Iser's original theory of reader-response and his later focus on literary anthropology.]
I. FICTIONALITY AND NEGATIVITY: CONNECTIVE TISSUES IN ISER'S WORK
In relation to the empirical world, the imaginary as otherness is a sort of holy madness that does not turn away from the world but intervenes in it.2
[N]egativity provides the structure underlying the interaction between text and reader.3
The two epigraphs chosen for this essay contain in a nutshell the most pressing concerns in Iser's work. Literature as an instrument of “holy madness” figures as a kind of...
[The entire page is 7165 words long]
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