Restaging the Reception of Iser's Early Work, Or Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic

I

In the fall of 1998, Emory Elliott of the University of California, Riverside, organized a conference on "Aesthetics and Difference." A front page article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called "Beauty Is Back" plugged the conference as a sign of renewed interest in the aesthetic. Elliott was not pushing for a return to the New Criticism. Nonetheless, he did want to revisit questions of aesthetic value. Paraphrased as claiming that "In the canon wars cultural conservatives have been the only ones arguing for aesthetic criticism," he is then quoted as saying that, if there is to be a return to the aesthetic, "I want my guys to be leading this direction." ¹

For anyone familiar with the work of Wolfgang Iser, Elliott's comments have to raise questions. Certainly, for Iser aesthetic questions have not been what Elliott calls them: the "forbidden subject." Whereas his work has taken some surprising turns, it has consistently focused on aesthetic experience. And by no means in obscurity. In 1981, Stanley Fish reported--perhaps with a touch of envy--that "The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading outsell all other books on the prestigious list of the Johns Hopkins Press with the exception of Grammatology (a book that is, I suspect, more purchased than read)." ² Since Iser's work is so well known in the United States, what are we to make of Elliott's comments? Should Iser be labeled a cultural conservative?

A goal of this essay--along with others in this issue--is to argue that, if Iser is labeled a cultural "conservative" by cultural "radicals," something is wrong with how sides have been drawn in the culture "wars." My way of making that point will be to look at the reception in the United States of Iser's early work. That reception, as most receptions do, tells us as much about the audience doing the receiving as it does about the work being received.

I will start with a brief look at explanations for Iser's popular initial reception in the United States. Those explanations were not simple descriptions; they also influenced Iser's reception. For instance, in accounting for Iser's initial popularity, Steven Mailloux constructs an Iser similar to the one constructed by Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton in their polemical attacks against him. Looking closely at those two attacks and pointing to their confusions can suggest ways for Iser's work to contribute to renewed discussions of the aesthetic without returning to old-fashioned formalisms. Doing so can also place in perspective some of the assumptions underlying two different turns to "political" criticism.

II

To argue that people like Fish and Eagleton contributed to confusion about Iser's work is not to claim that the fault was all theirs. Ambitious in scope, Iser's work at times lends itself to misunderstanding. Iser himself has recognized problems with various formulations and has tried to clarify them. Indeed, his later work on literary anthropology provides the advantage of hindsight and can help to clarify some of the confusion that his earlier work on the act of reading generated. Unfortunately, the later work--while not ignored--has not had the widespread appeal of the earlier work, in part because of confused characterizations of the earlier work. ³

One reason for confusion was Iser's effort to engage debates familiar to an American audience on, for instance, the New Criticism, validity in interpretation, and speech act theory. Whereas at its most provocative this engagement generated new insights on familiar topics, it also ran the risk of being domesticated. Ironically, then, the very ease by which Iser was accommodated to debates in the United States--an ease that to a large measure explains his popular initial reception--contributed to some of the most persistent misunderstandings of his work. ⁴

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