A "Figure" in Iser's "Carpet" Author(s): Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan Reviewed work(s): Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter, 2000), pp. 91-104 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057589 . Accessed: 18/03/2013 11:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:04:40 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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A "Figure" in Iser's "Carpet"Author(s): Shlomith Rimmon-KenanReviewed work(s):Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter,2000), pp. 91-104Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057589 .
Accessed: 18/03/2013 11:04
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNew Literary History.
http://www.jstor.org
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In 1978, Wolfgang Iser published a brilliant analysis of Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet."1 Around the same time, I also pub lished a study of that enigmatic story, from a completely different
point of view.2 Twenty years later, in an essay concerning his work, it
seems appropriate to play Iser's own game and try to trace a "figure" in
his "carpet." However, interpreting Iser in the spirit of his reading of
James is a tricky business, since?according to him?"The Figure in the
Carpet" is a warning against interpretation (at least when interpretation is conceived of as a statement about a concealed referential meaning).
Furthermore, the reasons for Iser's objection to
interpretation are part
and parcel of the "figure" in his own "carpet." While tracing this
"figure," therefore, I wish to emphasize both the existence, in principle, of many other "figures" and the non-finalizing character of my interpre tation of its significance.
A figure in a Persian carpet is a complex pattern of repetitive yet
expanding shapes. My paper will show a similar phenomenon in Iser's
work: a patterning of recurrent
expressions and concepts, creating
continuity between his contributions to different areas, and an expan
sion of their implications and functions as he moves from reader
response to literary anthropology to cultural translatability. In order to
render the "figure" concrete and bring it into sharp focus, I shall then
"perform" it by reading Beckett's Company side by side with Iser's theory as well as his analyses of the trilogy and plays.
The main features of the "figure" I detect in Iser's work are: the space
between (+ virtuality), dynamism (+ process), interaction, blanks and
gaps, activation of the reader's imagination, a to-and-fro movement,
plurality, kaleidoscopic switches, mutual mobilization. All these stress
the dynamics of interactional experience, rather than the stasis of
reified meaning, and their permutations in Iser's work suggest that seeds of the later studies were already implicit in the earlier. Take, for
example, the kaleidoscope image, which I have always associated with the later Iser and have now found in a work as early as The Implied Reader: "As we have seen, the activity of
reading can be characterized as a sort of
kaleidoscope of perspectives, reintentions, recollections."3 More surpris
ing, the concern with literary anthropology, which becomes the center
New Literary History, 2000, 31: 91-104
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of Iser's theorizing in The Fictive and the Imaginary, is anticipated, though partly through negation, in one of his earliest publications in English, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction." In this
essay, Iser asks: "What is it that makes the reader want to share in the
adventures of literature?" and then relegates the exploration of the
question to another discipline: "This question is perhaps more for the
anthropologist than for the literary critic."4 In 1993 (and its anticipation in 1989), this question
no longer
seems extra-literary. On the contrary,
as opposed to many current tendencies which explore literature through the prism of other disciplines (for example, philosophy, psychoanalysis), Iser is interested in using literature as exploratory. Accordingly, the
subtitle of The Fictive and the Imaginary stresses a literary anthropology, and the book attempts to chart the human imagination by way of its
responses to literature.
What are we to make of these (and other) recurrent concepts and
expressions? Is Iser merely repeating himself? Has he developed a
conceptual framework and then simply applied it to different objects of
study? To my mind, even if this were the case, "simply" would be far from a felicitous description; rather, the "applications" could be taken to
indicate that the key discovered is so powerful that it opens many locks.
However, I wish to make a stronger claim. I argue?and examples will
follow?that the basic features of the "figure" in Iser's "carpet" undergo intensification, self-reflexivity, and expansion as his work develops. The
development, of course, is a continuum, not a binary opposition
between "early" and "late," as my formulations may sometimes make it
sound.
Intensification consists in raising phenomena to a higher power (in the mathematical sense). While the early work deals with interaction
between elements (for example, "the reader" and "the text"), the later
work describes interaction between elements already turned into pro cesses (for example, "the fictive" and "the imaginary"). Processes, in
turn, are put into motion by a relational operation that simultaneously activates them and is activated by them, thus raising the kinetic to the
third power.
By "self-reflexivity" I am referring to the way in which early statements
about literature are mirrored in the later work by the very fabric of Iser's
style. Thus, for example, early discussions of the reader's to-and-fro
oscillation tend to take the shape of approach-avoidance formulations in
the later work. True, this increases the difficulty of reading Iser, but?
more importantly?it endows theoretical discourse with the performative nature characteristic of literature (according to Iser), at once depriving it of a claim to truth and perpetuating the quest for the inaccessible.
Expansion occurs on various levels. First, there is the obvious move
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ment from literature proper to a broader range of phenomena, or?
more specifically?from reader-response to literary anthropology to
cultural translatability. Moreover, objects of study become instruments
for further study. Thus, in the early work, literature is the object of
exploration; in the later work, on the other hand, it becomes an
instrument for exploring the operation of the human mind. Similarly, the early work is concerned mainly with the question "How litera
ture?"?that is, how does literature affect the reader while simulta
neously being "realized" by him?5 The later work, on the other hand, moves from "How literature?" to
"Why literature?"?that is, what func
tions does literature perform in relation to the human makeup? This
change of question explains why early-phase answers become triggers for further questions in the later phase. For example, blanks and gaps are important in the early phase because they make reading an active
process, an experience, rather than a
passive consumption, and "pro
cess" is valorized in Iser against "entities," "givens," "essences," "reifica
tions," "closure," "stasis." But why is process valorized? This is a question
that the second phase illuminates beyond literature in terms of van
quishing human limitations.
Instead of jumping ahead, however, I propose to fill in my argument in two stages, following the expansion I have outlined. The first is
descriptive in character, exemplifying?mostly in Iser's own voice?the
various components of the "figure" and showing how they unfold with time. The second stage is a discussion of the significance (or functions) of the pattern in the light of the later work.
In an oft-quoted position statement, Iser defines the literary work not as an
entity but as a space between two
poles:6 "From this we may conclude
that the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author's text and the aesthetic is the
realization accomplished by the reader . . . the work cannot be identical
with the text or with the concretization, but must be situated somewhere between the two" (IR 274).7 In a still earlier text, literature's "halfway position" is said to be "between the external world of objects and the reader's own world of experience" (RR 8). The subtitle of a collection
containing a sample of Iser's ongoing work on cultural translatability is
"Figurations of the Space Between."8 Here the space is not only
a result,
or manifestation, of the experience of cultural difference, but also a
value. A "colonization of the space between" would involve either a
domination of one culture by another or a self-effacement of a culture
upon confronting another, not the desirable relationship of respect and mutual transformation.
I have said earlier that the space-between is not an actual junction. Nor is it a stable location. It is a process rather than a product (AR 48), "a
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complex interaction between text and reader" (RR 5). Throughout his
work, Iser emphasizes both the play between textual structures and their
recipient9 and the "continually interacting elements" within the ever
changing text (RR 17). It is precisely in the name of an experiential process rather than a finalized meaning that Iser criticizes the critic narrator in James's "The Figure in the Carpet." According to Iser, the
critic-narrator in James's story fails because he treats
meaning as a
detachable message (AR 7), whereas the story suggests that "meaning is no longer an object to be defined, but is an effect to be experienced" (A? 9-10). The "figure" in the "carpet" emerges from "an interaction
between the textual signals and the reader's acts of comprehension"
(AR 9). Dynamism is intensified in The Fictive and the Imaginary where the
interaction occurs between elements already turned into processes.
Here, age-old faculties become modes of operation, and definitions are
transformed into programs. Two quotations concerning the title's key
concepts illustrate the dynamization quite clearly: (1) "By fictive here is meant an act, which has all the qualities pertaining
to an event and thus
relieves the definition of fiction from the burden of making the
customary ontological statements
regarding what fiction is."10 Because
of the objection to ontological definitions, chapter 1 of the book deals
with "fictionalizing acts" rather than with "fiction" or "fictionality." (2) "As far as the literary text is concerned, the imaginary is not to be viewed as a human faculty;
our concern is with its modes of manifestation and
operation, so that the word is indicative of a program rather than a
definition" (FI 305n4, my emphasis). The relationship between the
fictive and the imaginary, obviously a central issue in the book bearing that title, is a process, a continual motion, at once
activating and being activated by its two constitutive motions. A similar kinetic quality
animates Iser's conception of culture as "not a static and definable entity
but a galaxy of mobile features that dwarf every attempt at reducing culture to a conceptual point of view" (TC 299). Dynamism reigns supreme in all aspects of Iser's theory.
"How shall we then describe the dynamic character of a text?" is a
question that concerns Iser from the beginning of his theoretical
enterprise (RR 3). Two interdependent factors recur in his various
descriptions: "blanks" "gaps" and "indeterminacies" in the text and the
correlative activity of the reader's imagination: "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 . . . indeed without the elements
of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to use our
imagination" (IR 283). The activity set in motion by these absences is, at
least partly, a
to-and-fro movement of
constructing, discarding, and recon
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structing hypotheses. Readers always seek consistency, but their efforts
are continually frustrated, so as to stimulate further efforts: "However, if
the reader were to achieve a balance, obviously he would then no longer be engaged in the process of establishing and disrupting consistency. And since it is this very process that gives rise to the balancing operation, we may say that the nonachievement of balance is a prerequisite for the
very dynamism of the operation" (IR 286-87). Discussions of the to-and-fro movement on the reader's part become
an approach-avoidance "game"
on Iser's part when he describes, for
example, textplay, staging, and simulacrum as attempts to
glimpse the
inaccessible without tampering with its inaccessibility. The process he is
concerned with is one of gesturing toward a possibility without ever
coinciding with what it is a possibility of: "every appearance is a faked
mode of access to what cannot become present" (FT 300), and "the
simulacrum always bears the inscription that what it is forming is
unformable" (?7302). The "figure" traced so far has linked the space-between to interaction
and then to the dynamism created by blanks and indeterminacies as well as by incessant but necessarily unsuccessful attempts to fill them in. Both
the virtual space and the gaps, however, also give rise to plurality, for
different readers fill them in differently. Plurality, in turn, provokes further dynamic interplay: "one text is potentially capable of several
different realizations, and no reading
can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way. ... In this
very act the dynamics of reading are revealed" (IR 280). The Fictive and
the Imaginary similarly relates plurality to the space-between: "Literature
makes itself into a setting in which that very space launches itself into
multifarious patternings" (?7296). Both the forward-backward movement of hypotheses-construction
and the "variety," "diversity," "proliferation" of possibilities are often
described as " kaleidoscopic switches" (?Txviii, 299). In The Implied Reader, as
we have already seen, the kaleidoscope image relates to changes in the reader's interaction with the text. The Fictive and the Imaginary enlarges the scope of the image far beyond the activity of reading to the way we
give meaning to our lives. Thus, it detects kaleidoscopic shifts in the
rendering of reality (FI 284), the subject's staging of him/herself (FI xix), the boundary-crossings characteristic of fictionalizing acts (FIxv), and even the inaccessibilities to which we seek to gain access (?T299). In
The Translatability of Cultures the image is extended beyond the life of the
individual to the cultural process, or more specifically the relationship between temporal dimensions in it: "This kind of mutuality allows for all
kinds of kaleidoscopic shifts and gradations which tie tradition inextrica
bly to a present and vice versa" (TC301).
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tion with texts rather than as their passive consumption. The underlying
phenomenological assumptions have been sufficiently pointed out by Iser himself as well as by various commentators on his work.11 What has
only recently come to light are the implications of the "figure" beyond literature, although in retrospect foreshadowings of these later insights can be traced in earlier texts as well. In the later work, it seems to me, the interaction between reader and text becomes a mise en abyme of the
ways people relate to themselves, to others, and to the world. This may be the reason why Iser retrospectively describes literary anthropology as
"both an underpinning and an offshoot of reader response criticism."12
Our non-coincidence with ourselves, the opacity of others, and
temporal finitude are the main human limitations dwelt on in The Fictive
and the Imaginary. They are also the main triggers for recurrent attempts at self-extension. Non-coincidence is both ontological and epistemologi cal. The incapacity
to be self-present results in an insurmountable
distance between "being" and "having" ourselves (FI 296). Moreover, while we do have "evidential experiences," characterized by "instanta neous
certainty," like falling
in love, we cannot know what we experience,
we cannot "look at" what happens to us (FI 299-300). This double split stimulates an incessant process of
testing out
illusory presences and
alternative understandings, thereby turning disadvantages into opportu nities. In Iser's words, "The impossibility of being present to ourselves
becomes our possibility to play ourselves out to the fullness that knows no bounds, because no matter how vast the range, none of the
possibilities will 'make us tick'" (FI 297). If we are, in this sense, our own otherness, our
attempts to understand
other "others" is at least equally problematic. The opacity of the other
intrigued Iser long before The Fictive and the Imaginary. In "Interaction between Text and Reader," he approached the problem from the
perspective of Laing's The Politics of Experience. According to Laing, 'Your
experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you. I cannot experience your experience. You cannot
experience my
experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one
another. Experience is man's invisibility to man."13
Seen through Iser's lenses, this "invisibility" spurs the desire for
interpersonal relations, our inability
to know how we experience
one
another becoming a propellant to interaction. The gap in our knowl
edge causes us to construct our own
conception of the way the other
experiences us, our reactions to the other being based upon these
projections. With time, however, we discover that these are projections, that is, "images" of a reality that exists but remains unknowable. Such a
discovery is itself potentially productive, initiating further construction
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in his own "carpet." Has Iser's theory emerged from his interaction with
Beckett's texts, or does he project his own emergent theory on Beckett?
In terms of the "figure" I have outlined, this question is unanswerable.
Rather than posit causality in one direction or another, I see the
relations between the two as a case of mutual mobilization. In other
words, Beckett is both a basis and a confirmation of Iser's thinking, and
theory?I would add?is both an underpinning and a result of reading. To continue the interactional chain, I would now like to discuss
Beckett's Company in conjunction with Iser's theory as well as his analyses of the trilogy and the plays.17 My aim is not to "apply" Iser's theory or
textual insights, but to "stage" an interplay in which my reading of
Beckett will simultaneously offer a reading of Iser. This move, I believe,
"performs" Iser's view of a "figure" in a
"carpet" (James's, Beckett's, his
own) not as a reified meaning or
pattern but as a response-provoking
constellation.
Company, as I see it, is a fictional autobiography of a "fabling" subject who carefully avoids the first person and "speak [s] of himself as of
another." Paradoxically, the "I" is present through absence and nega
tion. At one point, the subject on his back in the dark muses: "In
another dark or in the same another devising it all for company. .. . Why
in another dark or in the same? And whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all. . . .
Who asks in the end, Who asks? The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable.
Last person. I. Quick leave him" (C22, 24). The technique used here is
precisely the one Iser describes in his analysis of the trilogy, that is,
posing a hypothesis and instantly dismantling it, making a statement
only to dismiss it. With "I" explicitly eschewed, Company dramatizes the
non-coincidence of the subject with himself through an interplay of
personal pronouns, a discontinuity between present and past, a dismem
berment of the body, and a fragmentation of the text.
The text alternates between sections in the third person and sections
in the second. The second-person sections are spoken by
a voice and
concern partly the present situation of the solitary subject ('You are on
your back in the dark") and partly memories, which the voice wishes to
convince the one are his (annoying his mother by a comment about the distance of the sky, being encouraged by his father to jump into the
water, unwittingly causing the death of the hedgehog, having an
ambivalent relationship with a woman). The third-person sections are
partly about the one on his back in the dark and partly about an
amazingly cerebral creative process?with its hypotheses, hesitations, and reservations?of someone who "devise [s] it all for company" (C8). These shifts, as well as the omission they signal, dramatize, "perform," a
de-reification, destabilization, and dispersal of the concept of "self:
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the dynamics of change: "One day! In the end. In the end you will utter
again. Yes I remember. That was I. That was I then" (C 21; my emphasis). In a mutual mobilization that Iser would no doubt appreciate, the
absence of unity turns out to be both a trigger and an effect of company. As long as there is unity, there is no company. Otherness is a necessary condition for company, and when "one" is alone, otherness takes the form of otherness-to-self, namely split, fragmentation, transforming
aspects or parts of the subject into others. In his solitude, the subject invokes the voice and the hearer as potential friends: "Little by little as
he lies the craving for company revives. . . . The need to hear that voice
again" (C 55); "Might not the hearer be improved? Made more
companionable if not downright human" (C 34). Parts of the body (for
example, the ear [C34]) and physical postures (being prone or supine [C 26-27, 56]) also become an addition to company, as do the
hypothetical fly (C 28) and dead rat (C 27) who would have been welcome in the empty room.
Self-extension and sociability depend in Company on "fabling," "devis
ing," and "narrating," that is, what Iser calls
"fictionalizing acts." The
subject on his back in the dark is a "devised deviser devising it all for
company" (C 46), straining beyond his limits by imagining a world,
narrating his story to himself, and inventing doubles who both are and are not himself. In what Iser (both when analyzing Beckett and when
developing his own theory) describes as a to-and-fro movement, doubles
are no sooner conjured up than rejected as mere figments. This type of
zigzagging sequence is particularly pronounced in relation to the initials invented to "represent" or "name" the doubles. Evoking the divine fiat, the creator muses: "Let the hearer be named H. Aspirate. Haitch. You
Haitch are on your back in the dark. And let him know his name"
(C31). An initial, of course, is not exactly a name, but?in addition to
evoking the sound of breathing, often referred to in the text?"H" is the first letter in both "hearer" and "he," thus gaining a certain degree of
substantiality, only to be immediately dispelled: "Is it desirable? No. Would he gain thereby in companionability? No. Then let him not be
named H. Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You"
(C32). But the game with letters does not stop here. A few pages later,
"feeling the need for company again he tells himself to call the hearer M at least. For readier reference. Himself some other character. W" (C42
43). This time, the initial confers an even greater substantiality (M =
AM?), but it also hints at the interchangeability of doubles both by calling the other AM and by using two letters which visually mirror each other in reverse (M and W). Moreover, W = "double you," and the hearer was constantly addressed as "you." In typical fashion, however, all
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this is soon undone: "Is there anything to add to this esquisse? His
unnamability. Even M must go. So W reminds himself of his creature as
so far created. W? But W too is creature. Figment" (C 45).
Fictionalizing not only creates insubstantial figments who are never
theless a good enough society, but also?as in Iser?appears to postpone the end. Fabling, devising, narrating are equated with both company and life. At the end, the subject is lonely and expiring. Death cannot be
postponed once 'You hear how words are
coming to an end. With every
inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of
one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling with you in the dark.
And how better in the end labor lost and silence. And you as you always were. / Alone" (C 62-63). "Alone" thus terminates life, the game with
fictions, the subject's process of narration, and Beckett's text.
* * *
In this essay I trace a patterning
of concepts and expressions in Iser's
work. By analogy with James's story and Iser's reading of it, I call this
kinetic cluster a "figure"
in the latter's "carpet," and argue that it
undergoes intensification, self-reflexivity, and expansion as Iser's work
develops. I then "perform" the "figure" by reading Company side by side
with Iser's theory as well as his analyses of Beckett.
Quite a few analogies emerge in the course of my argument. In
retrospect, they strike me as a further confirmation of the "figure" and
therefore an appropriate
conclusion to my discussion. First, there are
analogies between what Iser says about different areas: reader-response,
literary anthropology, culture. These, I believe, are a manifestation of
the continuity and expansion I see in his work. Further analogies
can be
detected between Iser's theoretical thinking and his analyses of Beckett.
These can be explained as a result of mutual mobilization, Beckett's
work seen as both a basis and a confirmation of Iser's theory. This is why it is hard to say whether the theory emerges from Iser's interaction with
Beckett's texts or, conversely, his reading of Beckett is a projection of his
theory. A similar mutual mobilization can be perceived between what
Iser says about Beckett's trilogy and what I say about Company, since I
read the latter in conjunction with the former.
Of a different kind is the analogy between what Iser says and the way
he says it, for example when, in an approach-avoidance style, he talks
about a to-and-fro movement. The analogy between Iser's theorizing and my analysis of it belongs to the same category, both because my
analysis is a retracing of his "figure" and because my style begins to
sound more and more like his. Beyond continuity, expansion, and
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mutual mobilization, these analogies dramatize the performative aspect of both literature and literary theory. Thus Iser does not only say what he
thinks but does it in his own writing. And texts?James's, Beckett's, and
Iser's?are not objects for the reader's act of deciphering but invitations
to a response that "performs" them. This, perhaps, is why Iser "repeats"
James and Beckett, and I "repeat" both Iser and Beckett.
A caveat is in order, however. If the reader's interaction with the text is, in some sense, its "performance," and if there is a "figure" in the textual
carpet, a certain determinism seems to hover over the interplay. It is
important to
emphasize, in defense, that there is always
more than one
"figure" in a textual "carpet," and the one I discerned in Iser is in no way exclusive.18 Different readers find and "perform" different "figures,"
plurality keeping the reading-game alive. As Iser explicitly and self
reflexively says in an interview, "the path would be blocked if any model
achieved sufficient success to become reified."19
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
NOTES
1 Wolfgang Iser, "Partial Art?Total Interpretation: Henry James, 'The Figure in the
Carpet,' In Place of an Introduction," in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
(London, 1978), pp. 3-10.
2 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, "The Figure in the Carpet," in The Concept of Ambiguity?The
Example of fames (Chicago, 1977), pp. 95-115.
3 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, 1974), p. 279; hereafter cited in text as IR
4 Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction" (1971),
rpt. in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, 1989), p. 29; hereafter cited in text as RR.
5 Sartre's famous question, "What is literature?" is obviously one that Iser would reject as
a call for reifying, essentialist answers.
6 In the descriptive section that follows, I underline constitutive concepts of the "figure," for the sake of clarity and conspicuity. 7 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London, 1978), p. 21; hereafter cited in text as AR
8 The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and
Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, 1996); hereafter cited in text as TC.
9 For example, Wolfgang Iser, "Interaction between Text and Reader" (1980), rpt. in
Prospecting, p. 31; hereafter cited in text as IT.
10 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,
1993), p. 305n3 (his emphasis); hereafter cited in text as FI.
11 For example, Robert C Holub, Reception Theory (London, 1984). 12 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting, p. vii.
13 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (Harmondsworth, 1968), quoted in Iser, "Interaction between Text and Reader," p. 32.
14 In a discussion of the unknowability of others, Iser similarly says about pragmatically
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