Pater and Reception Aesthetics

31:4 Book Reviews would present no serious problem. Any scholar wishing to deal more theoretically with Moore's use of "German pessimism" will find this monograph the best, and most succinct, starting point. David B. Eakin McNeese State University PATER AND RECEPTION AESTHETICS Wolfgang Iser. Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment. Translated from German by David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. $34.50 David H. Wilson's welcome translation of Wolfgang Iser's Walter Pater: Die Autonomie des Äesthetischen, originally published in 1960, is a concrete reminder of the significance of Pater's aesthetic theories in the development of Iser's critical perspective during the early years of his distinguished career. Rereading his study now, after twenty-eight years have passed, is reassuring and enlightening. The encompassing and suggestive nature of his earlier remarks on the problem of artistic autonomy and the aesthetic attitude, exemplified by Pater's subjectivity, disengagement, and unqualified receptivity to the limitless diversity of experience, still ring true, making the distance between Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment and Iser's 1974 publication of The Implied Reader and his more recent Act of Reading (1978) seem pleasantly shorter. Iser admits in the "Foreword," written for the new translation, to mixed feelings when he realized that his old study was to be revived. Confessing to a compelling desire to revise portions of it, he, nevertheless, decided to forego the temptation in fear of the inevitable juxtaposition at this point in time of more current viewpoints. The implication behind his admission and his accompanying fear suggests that The Aesthetic Moment and his more recent work on reception aesthetics lack noticeable kinship. There are, however, several commendatory indicators throughout The Aesthetic Moment that concretize indeterminacies for 1980s readers interested in reception theory, happily resulting in some rather intelligent insight into the emergence in the late 1950s (antedating Barthes, Riffaterre , or Fish) of a critical awareness of the need to better understand reading strategies. As the personal and historical horizons shift so too do the opportunities to reevaluate and reactualize dated texts, a phenomenon that enables us now to reread metacritically Iser's The Aesthetic Moment along with works such as Hans Robert Jauss's 1955 publication of Zeit und Erinnerung in Marcel Proust Ά la recherche du temps perdu': Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Romans as seminal productions in the history and development of Rezeptionästhetik . Significantly, it was circa 1963, only three years after the publication of The Aesthetic Moment, when the leading members of the Konstanz school founded the famous colloquia so instrumental in the promotion worldwide of reception aesthetics. 475 31:4 Book Reviews In many ways, The Aesthetic Moment seems to anticipate The Implied Reader, particularly in Iser's comments on what he called at the time, "expression," a signifier for reproduced parts of experience that accord "with the secret wishes of the expresser," the "expression" of which is experience transformed by the alchemy of subjectivity. The theory foreshadows Iser's more complex argument in The Implied Reader on the necessity for authors to design texts that purposely "entangle" readers in the interpretive process. Iser acknowledges the traditionally textual-centered nature of the Pater study but admits that the attraction to Pater in the first place during the early years of his career was based on the belief that analysing Pater's work promised insight into the "experience of what it meant to make Art the ultimate value of finite existence." Through The Aesthetic Moment, Iser hoped to foreground problems in the 'fifties "which New Criticism could not cope with, since it was no longer concerned with the consequences of the autonomous object." By the late 'fifties , New Criticism had virtually failed as a viable paradigm of interpretation . Pater, for Iser, had attempted to combine both "real life" and "autonomous Art" and, hence, had established an aesthetics largely antithetical to new critical principles. The contrast also explains some of the mid-century antagonism to Pater's position in the literary canon. Historically, then, The Aesthetic Moment reflects a crisis in literary criticism that, according to Iser, characterized the 'fifties. Metacritically, however, the study also signifies a new direction that was available to literary criticism, a...