Implicit reader

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The concept of the implicit reader , which has been coined as a fundamental effect and aesthetic reception concept since the 1970s, especially by Wolfgang Iser , describes in literary studies , reader theory and literary theory in general the " reader role " of a literary text in the act of reading , d. H. the possible reader, who was fundamentally considered and included by the author when writing the text, in his constitutive role for the interaction between text and recipient as such. However, this perspective is not empirically oriented as an interpretation method that brings a specific reader into focus and tries to make the meaning ascribed to the text as a carrier of meaning tangible, but remains completely indifferent to the real reader and strives to become aware of the "transcendental character" of text structures generally approximated by an interactive analysis or description of the reading act.

In this respect, the term refers in the context of a theoretical construct to the entirety of all thought operations laid out in the structure of a text as indeterminacy or empty spaces , which is necessary for an appropriate reception of the work, but according to Iser does not describe a "typology of possible readers" and accordingly has ontologically “no real existence” in the sense of specific linguistic, psychological, sociological or other parameters. In spite of its connection with the text structure, it is also not characterized by explicitly designed or accessible figures or concrete voices in the text. The reference to the implicit reader in literary scholarly approaches does not necessarily refer to a real instance in the text and can embody a number of different interpretative theoretical premises, the modeling of which, however, is to be interpreted as a representation and communication principle.

The implied reader is a kind of minimal definition in this regard, literature theory, the conceptual complement and counterpart to that of WC Booth introduced in 1961 construct of the implied author ( implied author ) represents.

On this basis, the concept of the implicit reader is conceptually delimited in strict parallel to the implicit author, both from the real empirical reader and from the perspective of reader fiction ( fictional reader ) marked in the text . As a reception-related equivalent to the implicit author , the term postulates a separate communication level between these readers that is presented as personalized and thus establishes an additional level differentiated according to different semiotic levels in the communication model of narrative texts .

The characters around the narrator in Paludes ( Gide 1895) can be seen as examples for implicit readers. In Italo Calvino's novel When a Traveler in a Winter Night (1979) the concept is exaggerated in that the reader is no longer just implicitly present, but part of the novel as the protagonist .

While Iser in his concept with the concept of the implicit reader primarily seeks to capture the relationship between text and reader, as it were mentioned above, in an interactive model and thus refers less to historical differences and more to transcendental similarities in literary reception, the In other approaches to the aesthetics of reception, however, the term also relates to the development of the potential meaning that is laid out in a work and can be updated in its historical stages of reception. In the original sense of Iser, however, the implicit reader is generally to be understood as the “totality of the pre-orientations of the text”, thus as the meaning and role offered by the text for a hypothetically assumed recipient with regard to the transfer process from the text to the reader.

The anchoring of the implicit reader in the text and its dependence on the concretization by the respective reader is meanwhile largely regarded as capable of consensus in contemporary literary studies and theory. In contrast, the intentional aspects of the text, depending on an intentional author instance who consciously shapes the text features and their functions, are no longer always viewed as necessarily implicit, but as absolutely real in a historically explicit or concretizable form.

In the more recent discussion of literary theory in particular, the concept of the implicit reader is sometimes heavily questioned from a narratological perspective. The critics particularly complain about the contradicting status of this concept, which suggests a personalized instance and which is basically indistinguishable without being tied to a real or fictitious addressee ( fictitious reader ) as the recipient instance . A. Nünning , for example, advocates dispensing with this concept in order to avoid paradoxes , but at the same time transferring the theoretically relevant functions to the purely virtual system of an overall structure of the text as a cause that is absent in the sense of L. Althusser's concept of structure .

Likewise, the more recent interpretation practice raises the question of how, with the concept of the implicit reader, which in the narrow sense of Iser, beyond all historically existing, therefore factual ascriptions of meaning, models only possible modes of reception of a text ideally as a hypothesis, a text can historically do justice to the claim to interpret adequately.

In this context, critics also refer to Iser's own interpretive practice from The Implicit Reader , in which he himself does not analyze any real or factual assignments of meaning to literary texts against the background of his abstract model.

His form of historicizing literature viewing results largely from a very narrow aesthetic focus on the literary text form and does not infer the text from the context, but from the text to the context on the basis of his metahistorical assumption that the reader only has to “those indicated in the text by the spaces Make changes to the cast in the field of the reader's point of view ”and can“ regain the historical situation to which the text referred or to which it answered ”.

Iser's model thus thematizes the history of effects without examining specific records. His own exemplary approach to the historicization of literary text meanings is based "essentially on a mere amalgamation of interpretatively obtained results from individual text reading and no less individually acquired knowledge about historical reception conditions".

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The term was outlined by W. Iser in The Appell Structure of Texts 1970, then differentiated historically in various individual analyzes of English-language novels and theoretically substantiated in detail in Der Akt des Lesens (1976) as the central concept of his reception aesthetics.
  2. ↑ See Marcus Willand: Reader models & reader theories. Historical and systematic perspectives. Berlin 2014
  3. ↑ See Marcus Willand: Iser's implicit reader in the praxeological stress test - A literary concept between theory and method. In: Andrea Albrecht , Lutz Danneberg, Olav Krämer and Carlos Spoerhase (eds.): Theories, methods and practices of interpreting . De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2015, pp. 237–270, here p. 242.
  4. ↑ See Marcus Willand: Iser's implicit reader in the praxeological stress test - A literary concept between theory and method. In: Andrea Albrecht, Lutz Danneberg, Olav Krämer and Carlos Spoerhase (eds.): Theories, methods and practices of interpreting . De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2015, pp. 237–270, here pp. 237 ff. Cf. also Meinhard Winkgens: Readers, impliziter . In: Ansgar Nünning (ed.): Basic concepts of literary theory. Metzler Verlag , Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-10347-1 , pp. 145f., And Heike Gfrereis (Ed.): Reader . In: Heike Gfrereis (ed.): Basic concepts of literary studies . Metzler Verlag , Stuttgart and Weimar 1999, ISBN 978-3-476-10320-8 , p. 111.
  5. ↑ Cf. Meinhard Winkgens: Reader, implicit . In: Ansgar Nünning (ed.): Basic concepts of literary theory. Metzler Verlag , Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-10347-1 , p. 145. See also Marcus Willand: Iser's implicit reader in the praxeological stress test - a literary concept between theory and method. In: Andrea Albrecht, Lutz Danneberg, Olav Krämer and Carlos Spoerhase (eds.): Theories, methods and practices of interpreting . De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2015, pp. 237–270, here p. 238 f.
  6. ↑ See Marcus Willand: Reader models & reader theories. Historical and systematic perspectives. Berlin 2014, pp. 66–83
  7. ↑ See Meinhard Winkgens: Reader, implicit . In: In: Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Basic concepts of literary theory. Metzler Verlag , Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-10347-1 , p. 146.
  8. ↑ Cf. Marcus Willand: Isers implicit reader in the praxeological stress test - a literary concept between theory and method. In: Andrea Albrecht, Lutz Danneberg, Olav Krämer and Carlos Spoerhase (eds.): Theories, methods and practices of interpreting . De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2015, pp. 237–270, here p. 237 f.
  9. ↑ Marcus Willand: Isers implicit reader in the praxeological stress test - A literary concept between theory and method. In: Andrea Albrecht, Lutz Danneberg, Olav Krämer and Carlos Spoerhase (eds.): Theories, methods and practices of interpreting . De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2015, pp. 237–270, here pp. 245 f.
  10. ↑ See Marcus Willand: Reader models & reader theories. Historical and systematic perspectives. Berlin 2014, especially pp. 269–292.
  11. ↑ For the criticism, see in detail Marcus Willand: Isers implicit reader in the praxeological stress test - a literary concept between theory and method. In: Andrea Albrecht, Lutz Danneberg, Olav Krämer and Carlos Spoerhase (eds.): Theories, methods and practices of interpreting . De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2015, pp. 237–270. See also Meinhard Winkgens: Reader, implicit . In: In: Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Basic concepts of literary theory. Metzler Verlag , Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-10347-1 , p. 146.
  12. ↑ Marcus Willand: Isers implicit reader in the praxeological stress test - A literary concept between theory and method. In: Andrea Albrecht, Lutz Danneberg, Olav Krämer and Carlos Spoerhase (eds.): Theories, methods and practices of interpreting . De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2015, pp. 237–270, here pp. 247 and 249.