Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | 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...

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