Iser in New Literary History

The 1969 essay introducing reception theory to American readers comes from the journal New Literary History. I'm struck now that Ralph Cohen and the editors of NHL have been big contributors both to Iser's brand of thinking and to the significance of biographical writing, but I'm not sure if there is much overlap.

Before I look at that, though, I proposed to myself a small snapshot of what the journal has had to say about Iser.

Literature for "Democratizing"

The Winter 2000 issue was a special issued dedicated to the writings of Iser. In the useful introduction by John Paul Riquelme, I learned that Iser moved away from a theorization of the individual reader to his more political concern with the role of creativity in society. He takes an anthropological perspective on literary history that focuses on play and staging literary texts. There is an important political tendency here as well, one we might call "democratizing." Following up on the work of Karl Mannheim and on Iser's own experiences in Europe's 20th century, Iser's literary anthropology contains in it the advocacy of gradual democratic reform by providing for shifting positions, for entangled hierarchies, for continuous new positions of leadership.

A Sample Reader-Response Analysis

The Spring 1996 issue contains a rare address to Chinese readers, "Chinese American Literature beyond the Horizon" by Hardy C. Wilcoxon, a professor of English at the City University of Hong Kong. Note 3 is a useful review of reader response theory's highlighting the central problem of determining if what the reader reads into the text is "true" -- see the debate between Iser and Stanley Fish in Diacritics. The paper itself is a modest report of responses of Hong Kong English students to works like The Joy Luck Club, Woman Warrior, and M. Butterfly. These students are much more ambivalent to these works than a Western reader might presume.

Back to Autobiography: A Complex Connection

Bianca Thiesen's contribution to the Winter 2000 issue tackles the changes to the horizon inherent in Rilke's Notebooks, which apparently have both first-person autobiographical and third-person biographical passages. At first glance, it's a bit difficult to tell her point -- the style is extremely dense.