Wolfgang Iser

Iser redirects here. For other uses, see Iser (disambiguation).

Wolfgang Iser (born July 22, 1926) is a German literary scholar. He was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else (Steinbach) Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig, Tübingen and Heidelberg. In the latter university he also received his PhD in English by defending the dissertation on the worldview of Henry Fielding (1950). After a year he was assigned as an instructor in Heidelberg and in 1952 as an assistant lecturer at the University of Glasgow. There he started to explore contemporary philosophy and literature, which deepened his interest in inter-cultural exchange. Subsequently he became a cosmopolitan, among other things giving lectures in Asia and Israel.

He is known for his Reader Response theory in literary theory. This theory began to evolve in 1967, while he was working in the University of Konstanz. Together with Hans Robert Jauss he is considered to be the founder of Constance School of reception aesthetics. This theory is somewhat similar to hermeneutics, as both aim to describe the reader's contact with text and the author. Iser describes the process of first reading, how text develops into the whole and how the dialogue between the reader and text takes place.

Bibliography

• Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings (1952)
• Walter Pater. Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen (1960)
• Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (1972)
• Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (1976)
• Laurence Sternes "Tristram Shandy". Inszenierte Subjektivität (1987)
• Shakespeares Historien. Genesis und Geltung (1988)
• Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989)
• Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (1991)
• The Range of Interpretation (2000)

External links

• Interview with Wolfgang Iser
• The Literary Encyclopedia's profound article on Wolfgang Iser
• Presidential Lectures