Space (literature)

The blank space as a basic concept of reception aesthetics was introduced into literary theory by the English scholar Wolfgang Iser . Iser thus tied in with the concept of places of indeterminacy from the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden , but at the same time clearly distinguishes himself from his approach.

“Wherever text segments abruptly meet, there are spaces that interrupt the expected orderliness of the text.” (Iser: The act of reading, p. 302) At these points, the reader is challenged because he has to relate the text segments to one another put.

Wolfgang Iser made the concept of empty spaces fruitful in his book The Implicit Reader , published in 1972, above all for the analysis of English novels. There the term refers to the places in novels where different narrative perspectives, narrative attitudes or narrative threads collide. According to Iser, it is the job of the reader to relate these various elements, since this relationship is not dictated by the text. Iser bases his considerations on a historical model of evolution, according to which novels since the 18th century have given more and more space to the creative activity of the reader and have more and more gaps. For Iser, the novel Ulysses by James Joyce marks a high point for the “empty space amount” .

See also

• Hans Robert Jauß

literature

• Wolfgang Iser: The appeal structure of the texts . Indeterminacy as a condition for the effect of literary prose . Konstanzer Universitätsverlag, 2nd edition Konstanz 1971, ISBN 3-87940-003-2 .
• Wolfgang Iser: The implicit reader: Forms of communication in the novel from Bunyan to Beckett . Fink, Munich 1972, ISBN 978-3-8252-0163-0
• Wolfgang Iser: The act of reading. Aesthetic Effect Theory . Fink, Munich 1976, ISBN 978-3-7705-1390-1 .