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Quote :The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett Quote 1
[Texts] not only draw the reader into the action, but also lead him to shade in the many outlines suggested by the given situations, so that these take on a reality of their own. But as the reader's imagination animates these "outlines," they in turn will influence the effect of the written part of the text. Thus begins a whole dynamic process: the written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implication in order to prevent these from becoming too blurred and hazy, but at the same time these implications, worked out by the reader's imagination, set the given situation against a background which endows it with far greater significance than it might have seemed to possess on its own. In this way, trivial scenes suddenly take on the shape of an "enduring form of life." What constitutes this form is never named, let alone explained, in the text, although in fact it is the end product of the interaction between text and reader.
Reader-Response theorists love that word "interaction."
This is how it works: a work of literature provides you with a certain outline of a character, or a scene. It's like the text is a coloring book: you get all these cool outlines you're supposed to color in. And as you know if you've ever given a bunch a kids the same picture to color in, they're all going to do it a little bit differently.
Well, that's basically how a reader interacts with a work of literature: the reader colors in the outlines that the text gives with his or her own impressions, thoughts, and emotions. The words on the page act on the reader's mind, and the reader's mind acts on the words on the page.
Quote :The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett Quote 2
[T]he possible reader must be visualized as playing a particular role with particular characteristics, which may vary according to circumstances. And so just as the author [Thackeray] divides himself up into the narrator of the story and the commentator of the events in the story, the reader is also stylized to a certain degree, being given attributes which he may either accept or reject. Whatever happens he will be forced to react to those ready-made qualities ascribed to him.
So, we're talking about the implied reader here. What's that, you ask? Well, each text constructs its readers, at least to a certain extent. If a novel is using really fancy-pants vocabulary ("one would not expect such concupiscence in a woman of such puritanical habits," anyone?), then the implied reader is someone who is also kind of fancy-pants: he or she is someone with a big vocabulary, someone learned and intellectually elite.
If a narrator of another novel keeps saying, "I know you won't believe me, but I swear this happened," then the implied reader is someone who is untrusting, or someone who isn't taken in easily—that's why the narrator has to keep proving that what's being said is actually true.
So a text puts us, as readers, in a certain position: it assumes we're super clever, or we're super stupid, or we're super skeptical. Then we as readers either live up to those expectations, or we don't. But if you ask Iser, there is always an implied reader.
Iser is explaining to us one of his big concepts. Texts always imply a reader. And that's significant because it points up just how important readers are. A text can't really exist without readers. Texts are written to be read by someone, after all, even if that someone is just our imaginary friend Bubbles.
Quote :The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
By impeding textual coherence, the blanks transform themselves into stimuli for acts of ideation. In this sense, they function as a self-regulating structure in communication; what they suspend turns into a propellant for the reader's imagination, making him supply what has been withheld.
You know how when you read a book, sometimes there are these great big gaps? You know: let's say you finish a chapter, and then the next chapter is suddenly set ten years later. You're like, wait a minute, what the heck's happened in those ten years? What's with all this jumping around in time?
Or let's say you've been following this one character around for 60 pages, and you're really into him or her. Then suddenly that character disappears, and a new character pops up out of nowhere. You get confused. Where did the first character go? What happened?
According to Iser, these "gaps" or "blanks" are way important in literature. They may confuse the bejesus out of you, but they stimulate your imagination. If there's a blank of ten years in the middle of a novel, you're forced to think about what could have happened in those ten years—and to come up with all kinds of theories. If the character you like suddenly disappears from the book, you start trying to explain that character's disappearance: Were they kidnapped? Murdered? Did they run away?
Iser's ideas about the "blanks" in texts are important because he's showing how literary texts force us to become active readers who have as much a part to play in the telling of the story as the author does. We create the stories that we read by filling in the "blanks" that texts give us.