Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology

Prospecting (1989) is a collection of essays spanning the previous decade. Their range is impressive. Several deal with critiques of specific texts ("Arcadia," As You Like It, Ulysses), others with the relation between reader and text, and still others with literature in general. Of particular interest is the concluding essay: "Toward a Literary Anthropology." This latter phrase is a new Iser construct such that what occurs to a reader when he reads tells us about the internal thought processes of that reader. More than a few hostile critics have openly wondered why Iser even bothers to peek within the assorted psyches of readers. Iser has responded by pointing out that a literary anthropology is a natural outgrowth of his aesthetic response theories from the 1970s. These earlier theories related how the interplay of text and reader engendered the creation of meaning in the temporal/spatial continuum of gaps and blanks that induced readers to use their unique life experiences to posit a meaning that was unique for each reader. In Prospecting, Iser elaborates by charting the creation process of a reader who looks back upon previously written text and using his current and expected future fore-knowledge can reasonably expect to undergo a profound revelation due to his evolving perspective. In essence, Iser implies that the text exists only in the physical sense as meaningless symbols on the printed page. It follows that the text is a mobile pivot upon which the psychology of the reader feels free to swing. The critics who saw numerous faults throughout Iser's theory of aesthetic response even carped about his use of the word "anthropology," a term that is noted for ambiguity. A harder to dismiss criticism was Iser's assertion that it was only the union of text with reader psychology that could generate verifiable meaning. If a reader's psychology by itself was unable to account for idea generation, then they claimed that it was disingenuous to assert that this same reader psychology needed only a ready text to produce that meaning. Still, despite these several pointed criticisms of Prospecting, it yet belongs on the short reading list of required texts on literary theory.