Последние издания книг Вольфганга Изера

Book DescriptionLiterary theory has become a branch of learning in its own right, and for teachers as well as students its complexities can sometimes be daunting. In this succinct introduction, Wolfgang Iser, himself a renowned theorist:

There is a tacit assumption that interpretation comes naturally, that human beings live by constantly interpreting. In this sense, we might even rephrase Descartes by saying: We interpret, therefore we are. While such a basic human disposition makes interpretation appear to come naturally, the forms it takes, however, do not. In this work, Iser offers a fresh approach by formulating an "anatomy of interpretation" through which we can understand the act of interpretation in its many different manifestations. For Iser, there are several different genres of interpretation, all of which are acts of translation designed to transpose something into something else. Perhaps the most obvious example of interpretation involves canonical texts, such as the Rabbinical exegesis of the Torah or Samuel Johnson's reading of Shakespeare. But what happens when the matter that one seeks to interpret consists not of a text but of a welter of fragments, as in the study of history, or when something is hidden, as in the practice of psychoanalysis, or is as complex as a culture or system? Iser details how, in each of these cases, the space that is opened up by interpretation is negotiated in a different way, thus concluding that interpretation always depends on what it seeks to translate. For students of philosophy, literary and critical theory, anthropology, and cultural history, Iser's elucidation of the mechanics by which we translate and understand, as well as his assessment of the anthropological roots of our drive to make meaning, will undoubtedly serve as a revelation.

Why do we need literature, and what does this need tell us about human nature? Wolfgang Iser shows how these questions grew out of his pioneering work in reader-response criticism and how the answers to them may lie in the new field of literary anthropology. Iser's recent work spans a wide range of viewpoints and subject matter, from sixteenth- to twentieth-century literature, from Spenser and Shakespeare to Joyce and Beckett. In thirteen chapters that chart his intellectual development over the past decade, Iser sets forth what reader-response theory has accomplished―and where it has fallen short. Reevaluating such time-honored concepts as representation, he sketches out a new "play theory" of the text that sees literature as an ongoing enactment of human possibilities.

"A new book by Wolfgang Iser is an important event in the critical world. This one, with its wide-ranging and ambitious argument, will require the attention of everyone who thinks seriously and at all philosophically about literary culture and what

Iser examines what happens during the reading process, and how it is basic to the development of a theory of aesthetic response, setting in motion a chain of events that depends both on the text and the exercise of certain human faculties.

Like no other art form, the novel confronts its readers with circumstances arising from their own environment of social and historical norms and stimulates them to assess and criticize their surroundings. By analyzing major works of English fiction