The Reading Process ISER

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away
The Reading Process: A
Phenomenological Approach
Wolfgang Iser
Wolfgang Iser
• Professor of English & Comparative Literature,
University of Constance, Germany
• He along with his colleague Hans Robert Jauss
are considered exponents of Rezeption-
aesthetik (Reception Theory)
• His school of thought is based on Edmund
Husserl‘s Phenomenology, Roman Ingarden‘s
Aesthetics and Hans-Georg Gadamer‘s
Hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics
• The art of interpreting
• In this sense Freudian psychoanalysis can be
called hermeneutics.
• In fact Freud called it a Deutungskunst (art of
interpretation).
• Martin Heidegger called his philosophy
‘hermeneutical phenomenology‘, because it
was concerned with interpreting experience
Aesthetics
• branch of philosophy that deals with the
principles of beauty and artistic taste.
Phenomenology
• Study of structures of experience, or consciousness.
• Literally, phenomenology is the study of
“phenomena“: appearances of things, or things as
they appear in our experience, or the ways we
experience things, thus the meanings things have in
our experience.
• Phenomenology studies conscious experience as
experienced from the subjective or first person
point of view.
Part I
• A literary work has two poles: the artistic and
the aesthetic.
• A Literary work exists only when it is read.
• “The work is more than the text, for the text
only takes on life when it is realized, and
furthermore the realization is by no means
independent of the individual disposition of
the reader‫ ـ‬though this in turn is acted upon
by the different patterns of the text. The
convergence of text and reader brings the
literary work into existence“
• “. . . no author, who understands the just boundaries
of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to
think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the
reader‘s understanding, is to halve this matter
amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his
turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am
eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do
all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as
busy as my own.“
------- Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy
Part I
• Reading is a pleasure only when it is active
and creative and boredom & overstrain form
its boundaries
• “unwritten part“ of the text acts as the
stimulant of the reader‘s creative
participation.
• “Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than
appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is
not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is
composed of something that expands in the reader‘s mind and
endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are
outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character. . . .
The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the
tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the
present moment, half upon the future. . . . Here, indeed, in this
unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements
of Jane Austen‘s greatness.“
------- Virginia Woolf in her study of Jane Austen
• Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author
James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting
reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the
English language. The entire book is written in a largely
idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard
English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and
portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to
recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the
work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of
consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream
associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot
and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely
unread by the general public.
• Source: Wikipedia
Part II
• Analyse how sequent sentences act upon one
another.
• A literary text is constructed out of Intentional
sentence correlatives
• A literary text must leave room for the
reader‘s imagination because without an
active participation from the audience, the
text remains dormant.
• There is a continuous process of expectation
and modification or anticipation and
retrospection
• What we read is ‘foreshortioned“ in our
memory which help the text to reveal
multiplicity of connections
• Act of reading is a kaleidoscope of
Perspectives, pre-intentions & recollections
• When sentences cease to have tangible
connections boredom sets in
• Story will gain dynamism only through
inevitable omissions thereby giving the reader
the opportunity to fill in gaps
• “Whenever the flow is interrupted and we are
led off in unexpected direction, the
opportunity is given to us to bring into play
our own faculty for establishing connections
for filling in the gaps left by the text itself“
• “One text is potentially capable of several

different realizations, and no one reading can
ever exhaust its full potential, for each
individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own
way, thereby excluding the various other
possibilities“
• Every text has a potential time sequence
making the re-reading different
• Each time we read a piece of literature, it can
evoke a completely new meaning in us.(virtual
dimension of the text)
• Repeated reading induces innovative reading
• Manner in which the reader will experience
the text reflects his own disposition
Part III
• Anticipation and retrospection turn into
advanced retrospection in re-readings
• Author should activate the reader‘s
imagination inorder to involve him and realise
the intentions of his text
• Give equal importance to the ‘Written‘ as well
as the ‘Unwritten‘ part of the text.
• “ If one sees the mountain, then of course one can
no longer imagine it, and so the act of picturing the
mountain presupposes its absence. Similarly, with
the literary text we can only picture things which
are not there; the written part of a text gives us
the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that
gives us the opportunity to picture things; indeed
without the element of indeterminacy, the gaps in
the text, we should not be able to use our
imagination“
Part IV
• Picturing or filling in the gaps done by the
imagination is only one of the activities
through which we form the ‘gestalt‘
Gestalt
• An organized whole that is perceived as more
than the sum of its parts.
• A physical, biological, psychological, or
symbolic configuration or pattern of elements
so unified as a whole that its properties
cannot be derived from a simple summation
of its parts.
• “By grouping together the written parts of the
text, we enable them to interact, we observe
the direction in which they are leading us, and
we project onto them the consistency which
we, as readers, require“
• “Gestalt is not the true meaning of the text; at

best it is a configurative meaning”
• Authors use the weapon of illusion to meet
the expectation of the reader. This also results
in an element of escapism
• Simultaneous stimulation and frustration offer
different levels of consistency and can put the
reader off.
• Balancing act between configurative meaning
and ‘alien associations‘ help realise the
aesthetic experience
• “As we read, we oscillate to a greater or lesser
degree between the building and the breaking
of illusions. In a process of trial and error, we
organize and reorganize the various data
offered to us by the text. These are the given
factors, the fixed points on which we base our
“interpretation,” trying to fit them together in
the way we think the author meant them to
be fitted.”
Part V
• Three important aspects form the basis of
reader text relationship:
1 process of anticipation and retrospection,
2 consistent unfolding of the text as living event
3 resultant impression of life-likeness.
• During the reading process ‘something‘
happens to the reader.... ‘identification’
• Reader becomes the subject that does the
thinking
• Consciousness forms the converging point of
the author and reader
• “This involvement is well summed up by the
reaction of a critic to reading Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre: “We took up Jane Eyre one winter's
evening, somewhat piqued at the extravagant
commendations we had heard, and sternly
resolved to be as critical as Croker. But as we
read on we forgot both commendations and
criticism, identified ourselves with Jane in all
her troubles, and finally married Mr. Rochester
about four in the morning.” The question is
how and why did the critic identify himself with
Jane?”
• “The production of the meaning of literary texts
which we discussed in connection with forming the
“gestalt” of the text-does not merely entail the
discovery of the unformulated, which can then be
taken over by the active imagination of the reader;
it also entails the possibility that we may formulate
ourselves and so discover what had previously
seemed to elude our consciousness. These are the
ways in which reading literature gives us the chance
to formulate the unformulated.”
The Creation of Sound
by Wallace Stevens
He lacks this venerable complication.
His poems are not of the second part of life.
They do not make the visible a little hard
To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind

Or peculiar horns, themselves eked out
By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

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Little Miss Muffet

• “One text is potentially capable of several

• “Gestalt is not the true meaning of the text; at

To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind

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