It is an important work that will appeal to those interested in the reading process, aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and basic theoretical aspects of the novel. Book jacket.
Reevaluating such time-honored concepts as representation, he sketches out a new "play theoryof the text that sees literature as an ongoing enactment of human possibilities.
Ranging from the Renaissance pastoral to Coleridge to Sartre and Beckett, The Fictive and the Imaginary is a distinguished work of scholarship from one of Europe's most respected and influential critics.
"-Frank Kermode, Times Literary Supplement."Well-written, scholarly, perceptive... . A basic framework for a rational theory of literary effects and responses based on the novel."-Library Journal.
But what happens when the matter that one seeks to interpret consists not of a text but of a welter of fragments, as in the story of history, or is something hidden, as in the practice of psychoanalysis, or is as complex as a culture or a ...
In this succinct introduction, Wolfgang Iser, himself a renowned theorist: explains what “theory” is and why it is that there are so many different theories deals in turn with those theories that have made the greatest impact in recent ...