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Reader Response and Hypertext – Part III

© Jessica Laccetti

Iser's concepts, like Fish's, are within the "interpretive community" of reader response theory, and like Fish, he elaborates ways in which the act of reading involves an interaction between elements of the text and the act of reading. What Iser rejects though, is any insistence on an objective meaning hidden within the text: "If texts actually possessed only the meaning brought to light by interpretation, then there would remain very little else for the reader."
Iser insists that the meaning of the text is "in itself nothing more than an individual reading experience which has now simply been identified with the text itself." Like Rosenblatt
before him, Iser too rallies against the school of New Criticism; "one cannot help wondering why texts should indulge in such a 'hide-and-seek' with their interpreters; and even more puzzling, why the meaning, once it has been found, should then change again, even though the letters, words and sentences of the text remain the same." Reading, Iser explains, is not a teleological search for one, single meaning but instead a dynamic and "rather difficult interaction between text and reader" which means that any reading is only "one of the possible realizations of a text." The plurality of possible readings arise from the "gaps" or "blanks" in the text which the reader endeavours to fill in: "the reader is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said." Iser's notion of gaps follows his earlier strident proposition that readers make the text in what seems like an effort, on Iser's part, to reinscribe power in the text. The gaps then are not so much about the dominant role of the reader but prompts from the text itself (and author) about how to read it. Although the notion of filling gaps allows for multiple perspectives Iser, like Fish, describes an abstract and hypothetical reader who, all the same, is male: The fictitious reader is, in fact, just one of several perspectives, all of which interlink and interact. The role of the reader emerges from this interplay of perspectives, for he finds himself called upon to mediate between them, and so it would be fair to say that the intended reader, as supplier of one perspective, can never represent more than one aspect of the reader's role.

Iser catalogs some concepts of readers invoked in literary criticism in order to highlight his own concept of "the implied reader." This implied reader, Iser asserts, transcends the limitations of the superreader, the informed reader, and the intended reader, as it "embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect." Although Iser makes a distinction between real readers and hypothetical readers, his "implied reader" falls in the latter category. The implied reader, for Iser, is a theoretical construct which he uses to determine "the potential effect of the literary text," since his (the reader's) role is "laid down in the text." Acting as a mirror image of the author the implied reader can interpret the text because he can recognise the proper path through the narrative by way of the authorial codes contained within the text.

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