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New Literary History 31.1 (2000) 7-12



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Introduction:
Wolfgang Iser's Aesthetic Politics: Reading as Fieldwork

John Paul Riquelme


The wet center is bottomless.

Seamus Heaney, "Bogland" 1

The engaging complexity of Wolfgang Iser's work arises from many converging elements but primarily from his continuing attempts to identify and explore terra incognita that turns out always to be the terra infirma on which we tread. Like Seamus Heaney, when Iser digs with his pen he excavates territory that has no bottom. His writings consistently and insistently expose and describe doubled, antithetical aspects of cultural production as they contribute to a process of continual emergence. By evoking creativity's place in culture, Iser provides compelling evidence concerning the role of the aesthetic in human experience. Several crucial issues arise from Iser's commitment to our creative involvement with literature and with other elements of culture. They include especially the question of the political views that stand behind and within his theorizing and the question of his theory's relation to literary modernism as both a shaping source and an object of commentary. The two questions are not entirely separable, considering the frequent charge that the politics of literary modernism is reactionary. The democratizing aspects and implications of Iser's writings suggest that his aesthetic politics cannot easily be dismissed along with the modernist texts to which it responds.

Nowhere is Iser's emphasis on continual emergence clearer than in his attitude toward literary texts as cultural artifacts in which we recognize what we are not and what we might be. For Iser the act of reading involves our realizing that we are not what we mistakenly think ourselves to be and that, as a consequence, we may become something we never imagined possible. Iser gradually develops this attitude in his essays and books in English concerned with reading: "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction," The Implied Reader, and The Act of Reading. 2 The process of continual emergence is equally clear in [End Page 7] Iser's latest book, The Range of Interpretation (forthcoming 2000). While he provides a typology of interpretation, virtually a periodic table of kinds of interpretation, Iser describes the interpretive act as a form of translation in which what is basic and unavailable to us becomes "a productive mapping of ever new territories." The interpretive mapping is related to literature because it is a form of "figuration" that "equally assembles and dismantles territories." These territories are not firm ground. Like reading, interpretation is to be understood as performance rather than explication; instead of the unearthing of some buried object, interpretation is the process of digging itself. Both reading and interpretation involve the negotiating of a liminal, or in-between, space by means of activities that avoid "colonization," the ideological superimposing of meanings on human experience. Emergence is the "hallmark" of interpretation, which Iser presents as acts of world-making. 3

In his move from reader-response theory and criticism to the charting of a literary anthropology, Iser has maintained his focus on creative production, which he eventually presents as an imperative within culture. To provide an alternative to the historical materialist's emphasis on labor and struggle in human history, Iser explores the concepts of play and staging as defining elements in human experience that enable the writing of the history of the future as something new. In sketching the ways in which the unexpected and unprecedented can emerge, Iser begins from literature as a base. His phenomenological writings about the mental processing of literary texts, which had a strong influence on Anglo-American literary theory and criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, established an affective model of aesthetic response that stressed the reader's activity. For Iser, the act of reading is not an act of understanding something contained and given in advance by the text; instead, it generates a new perspective and mental object out of textual elements.

But his description of reading left room for being misunderstood as pertaining to individual readers primarily and to literature in a narrow...

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