From the Editors

This issue of New Literary History is devoted to the writings of Wolfgang Iser; the essays address, almost exclusively, the books that he has published. The essayists here are properly concerned with discussing the significance of his books, but there is an aspect of his writings that is not discussed: his contributions written as essays and published in New Literary History. For more than a quarter of a century, Wolfgang Iser has been involved in the inquiries, aims, experiments and direction of the journal. From the first article that he published in the Winter 1972 issue entitled "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach" to his editing and introducing the "25th Anniversary Issue" (Autumn 1994), more of his writings have appeared in New Literary History than those of any other critic or essayist. ¹

The journal was founded in 1969 to inquire into the nature, function and aims of "literature," of "history," and of the changing conceptions of the "new." In regard to "literature," the inquiries considered what the limits of the "literary" might be, what "history" was and how it intersected with the "literary," and how the "new" literary history differed from and/or was incorporated into the old. New Literary History was international in scope from its beginning, and by dealing with arts and disciplines that intersected with the literary, the journal was obviously interdisciplinary. It was this open-endedness that attracted Wolfgang Iser, and it was his boundary-crossing of philosophy, anthropology and literature that made his writing so central in dealing with the issues of the journal.

Wolfgang Iser was invited to the New Literary History conference at Bellagio in 1973, joined the board of Advisory Editors in 1974, and published his second essay, entitled "The Reality of Fiction: A Functionalist Approach to Literature," in the journal (Autumn 1975). ² His first essay had argued innovatively that the convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence; though this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, it must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader. This view of the text as a virtual phenomenon resulting from the convergence of a duality was to become for Iser one of his most fruitful insights. It was to lead him in time from an inquiry into literature to an inquiry into the nature of human behavior.

"The Reality of Fiction" dealt with the literary text as incorporating within it actual thought systems as well as elements of, and even complete, literary traditions. These provide the "dialogue" between text and reader and thus amplify what Iser meant by "convergence" in his earlier essay. In this essay convergence implied a "deforming" that made the fictive text different from reality. But insofar as chapters in a text are often written in different styles, the gaps in coherence are filled by the reader's imagination. Even though this essay was an extract from a book that became The Act of Reading, the reader's imagination was to be rethought by Iser and was to become for him a major insight into human behavior.

His next contribution was published in the tenth-anniversary issue of New Literary History (Autumn 1979) and was entitled "The Current Situation of Literary Theory: Key Concepts and the Imaginary." ³ This important essay pointed out that structure, function and communication had an "all-pervading importance in present day discourse" and that these concepts provided a valuable basis for diversification of views of the text. But this "very diversification of meaning makes dubious the assumption that meaning is the 'be-all and end-all' of the literary text" (17). Not meaning but the "imaginary" was the basis of the literary text and the imaginary was a reconceiving of the earlier concept of convergence. The "imaginary" was a fusion that existed not merely in literary texts but in manifold aspects of human behavior. Iser explained that the imaginary was first being opened as a concept...