So go ahead. Pick up that book. The author may have written the words, but Wolfgang Iser proved that the story belongs to you. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978)
These omissions aren’t failures. Iser called them (or blanks ). They are the engine of reading. wolfgang iser
The text is the score. You are the musician. So go ahead
If you’ve ever taken a literature class, you’ve probably heard of reader-response theory . While many scholars contributed to it, Iser is the giant whose shoulders the rest stand on. He flipped the script on traditional criticism. For Iser, a book isn’t a static object with a single, hidden meaning waiting to be excavated by an expert. Instead, wolfgang iser