Modern Language Association

Readers in Texts
Author(s): W. Daniel Wilson
Source: PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 5 (Oct., 1981), pp. 848-863
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462128
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Readersin Texts
A N INTRIGUING outgrowth of the past
decade's awakening fascination with the
reception of literary works is the new
focus on various types of readers within works.
As is often true with such new growths, how-
ever, the study of these fictional beings is be-
ginning to look like a tangled mass because of
its unruly profuseness. Confronted with studies
of readers' roles, ideal readers, fictive readers,
intended readers, implied readers, abstract
readers, virtual readers, and myriad other terms
that often seem to duplicate one another, the
novice cannot be blamed for turning with im-
patience to tried and true approaches to litera-
ture. I intend to clear up some of this confusion,
present a workable synthetic taxonomy, and, in
the process, attempt to bridge a regrettable gap
of awareness between English- and German-
language criticism. Along the way I examine the
work of several outstanding theorists, most
notably Erwin Wolff, Wolfgang Iser, Walter
Ong, Hannelore Link, and Gerald Prince.
German-language criticism reserves the term
"fictive reader" (fiktiver Leser) for a very re-
stricted phenomenon: an extreme example is
one of the hapless victims that Tristram Shandy
berates after interrupting the narrative:
- How could you, Madam, be so inattentive in
reading the last chapter?I told you in it, That my
mother was not a papist. --Papist! You told me
no such thing, Sir. Madam, I beg leave to re-
peat it over again, That I told you as plain, at least,
as words, by direct inference, could tell you such a
thing. Then, Sir, I must have missed a page.
(Vol. i, Ch. xx)
And so on, until the narrator forces Madam to
reread the entire chapter. Even when readers do
not speak up, they belong to the same basic type
as long as they are characterized in some way in
the text. Even such a comparatively innocent
address as to "the gentle reader" serves to char-
acterize a reader, to fix a sociological status for
him or her. We shall also see that the reader
848
W. DANIEL WILSON
need not be referred to directly in order to be
characterized. That this figure is a fictional cre-
ation of the author (much as the characters are)
rather than a real reader is obvious enough that
we can hardly take issue with the general term
"fictive reader"; for reasons that become clear,
however, the type should be specified further,
and I have chosen the name "characterized
reader" for this particular subtype of fictive
reader. This type occurs most frequently-
although by no means exclusively-in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century works. Its function can
be much more complex and important than one
might suspect at first glance.
Far more crucial is a less visible abstract
reader, that referred to when critics speak of a
"reader's role." Following Wolfgang Iser, I call
this structure the "implied reader," and I define
it as the behavior, attitudes, and background-
presupposed or defined, usually indirectly, in the
text itself-necessary for a proper understanding
of the text. This idealized reader may be con-
sciously or unconsciously conceived by the au-
thor, but he or she exists in every work, since
almost every "message" presupposes a certain
kind of recipient and implicitly defines him or
her to some extent. Anglo-American critics will
recognize Iser's indebtedness to Wayne Booth's
Rhetoric of Fiction and particularly to the con-
cept of the "implied author," which Booth out-
lined as follows:
Just as one's personal letters imply different ver-
sions of oneself, depending on the differing rela-
tionships with each correspondentand the purpose
of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with
a differentair dependingon the needs of particular
works.'
The "implied" author whom we sense in a text,
above or behind the narrator, is never identical
with the real author in all stages of life as we
experience him or her in other documents; the
author fictionalizes himself or herself in order to
meet the demands of a particular fictive world
 W. Daniel Wilson
and the accompanying communication. Thus the
writer creates a "second self" anew in every
work (Booth, p. 71). In an often-quoted pas-
sage, Booth relates this concept of the implied
author to the corresponding reader:
The author creates . . . an image of himself and
another image of his reader;he makes the reader,
as he makes his second self, and the most successful
reading is one in which the created selves, author
and reader,can find complete agreement. (p. 138)
In practice, the term "implied author" is fre-
quently superfluous. Booth was concerned with
countering attacks on an author's "sincerity"
that proceeded from a misguided comparison of
the implied authors in various works created by
the same writer. But in our theoretical context-
and in most interpretations-we are of necessity
already speaking of individual works. As long as
we do not make improper generalizations from
"Goethe in Elective Affinities" to "Goethe," for
example, we can simply refer to the "author" or
use his name when discussing the communica-
tive situation in a particular text. Hannelore
Link, who constructs much more clearly than
Iser a model in which the "implied author"
stands opposite the "implied reader" on one
level of communication, herself interchanges the
two concepts "author" and "abstract [i.e., im-
plied] author,"2 thus showing the superfluity of
the latter. It is essential, however, that we not
confuse the "implied reader" with the (real)
"reader," a mistake that is much more easily
committed.
Erwin Wolff introduced the term "intended
reader" (intendierter Leser) for this figure,3
which he describes as "the idea of the reader
that forms in the author's mind" or "the 'ideal'
representation which the poet conceives of his
audience and which then 'conditions' his work to
a much greater extent than the real reader . . .
ever could" (pp. 166, 143). That the intended
reader "conditions" the work shows that Wolff's
and Iser's concepts have the same foundation in
the text. We must be wary, however, of Wolff's
three methods for determining the author's "idea
of the reader": first, describing any reader who
may be directly portrayed in the work (i.e., the
characterized reader); second, ascertaining the
type of reader that complements a particular
generic form; and third, evaluating the author's
849
relevant theoretical remarks.4 The third method
has the same limitations that it has in any other
literary interpretation: the author's extratextual
comments on the work may be valuable, but
they must take second place to an analysis of the
work itself and must not be taken as more au-
thoritative than the work's structures if a con-
tradiction arises. The second method comes
closer to my concerns, since the generic form of
a work does, indeed, tend to limit the intended
readership. Certain faculties are required to ap-
preciate fully the innovation in a great work of a
particular genre, as Wolff shows in his analysis.
To understand a new sort of epistolary novel,
for instance, one must be familiar with earlier
representatives of the genre but remain open to
change; therefore, a novelist who achieves such
innovation automatically defines his or her in-
tended audience more narrowly.
Wolff's first method, while apparently most
relevant to my topic, actually manifests the most
serious and most widespread confusion in dis-
cussions of intratextual readers, that between the
characterized fictive reader and the intended or
implied reader. This criterion makes us wonder
whether Wolff has been writing about anything
other than the characterized reader all along; in-
deed, the confusion recurs throughout his essay.
Quoting the passage from Tristram Shandy cited
earlier, Wolff remarks that the narrator mocks
the intended reader; further, since "Madam" is
but one of a large group of such figures, Wolff
says that we can infer an individualization of the
intended reading public (pp. 152-53). For
Wolff, then, "Madam" is the reader type Sterne
wished for this work, and, inversely, her pres-
ence in the work attests to Sterne's wish. Of
course, authors may sometimes straightfor-
wardly characterize a reader by whom they
want to be read. Such characterizations of the
intended audience often appear in lyric po-
etry and in narratives where the reader is char-
acterized only indirectly. It is not true in Tris-
tram Shandy, where we are presented caricatures
of readers, satirized readers whose behavior the
author does not wish his intended reader to emu-
late. The conduct of characterized readers is in
principle as little a model for our own response
as the characters' conduct. In fact, Elizabeth W.
Harries has shown that in leading eighteenth-
century fiction these characterized readers are
 850 Readers in Texts
"negative models" or foils for the intended read-
er's response.5 Wolff is not alone in this mis-
conception; many German-language critics
adopt it, and one of the few English-language
contributors to the discussion, Lowry Nelson,
Jr., writes that "of the many ways in which the
reader is granted his fictive role, perhaps the
most elementary is the direct address to him"
and that another is "direct mention of him
within the fictional body of the work."6
Wolff's misunderstanding provides a basis for
a look at the work of Wolfgang Iser, one of the
foremost critics in the field of reader-oriented
theory. In his book The Act of Reading (1976;
trans. 1978), and not in his earlier The Implied
Reader (1972; trans. 1974), Iser most clearly
defines what he means by the "implied reader,"
partly by discussing related concepts like
Wolff's.7 Referring to Wolff's first method of de-
termining the intended reader, Iser concludes
that what Wolff really means by the "intended
reader" is the reader characterized in the text
(Leserfiktion).8 But Iser accepts this faulty
identification of the two concepts, not realizing
that the characterized reader cannot categori-
cally be identified with the reader who is "in-
tended" by the author and who "conditions" the
work. Iser's confusion can be seen in the follow-
ing passage, where he contradicts himself:
The intended reader, then, marks certain positions
and attitudesin the text, but these are not yet iden-
tical to the reader'srole, for many of these positions
are conceived ironically, ... so that the reader is
not expected to accept the attitudeoffered him, but
ratherto react to it. (Act, p. 33; Akt, p. 59)
How can these attitudes be "intended" for the
reader who is "not expected to" identify with
them? By failing to scrutinize Wolff's application
of the term "intended" to the characterized
reader, Iser skirts the question of whether his
own implied reader or reader's role is equivalent
to the properly understood intended reader. In-
deed, if we take only Wolff's initial definition of
the intended reader as "the idea of the reader
that forms in the author's mind" and that "con-
ditions" the work and reject his and Iser's false
identification of this reader with the character-
ized reader, the difference between intended and
implied readers virtually disappears. Iser at-
tempts to distinguish between them, between,
respectively, "the image of the reader in the au-
thor's mind" ("das Bild des Lesers, das dem
Autor vorschwebte") and "the activity of con-
stituting [meaning] which is prescribed to the
recipients of texts" ("die den Empfangern der
Texte vorgezeichnete Konstitutionsaktivitat").
If the author's "image of the reader" "condi-
tions" his or her work, then it necessarily forms
a role in the text that shows readers how to
understand that text (or to "constitute its mean-
ing"). Or, to approach this issue differently, who
but the author can prescribe anything to the
reader? Iser would probably argue that the text
itself does so, and in this sense Hannelore Link
notes that the intended reader is identical to the
implied reader only when authors succeed in
formulating their "messages" according to their
intentions, that is, in writing for the reader they
intended to write for. But Link also points out
that in most works that we consider "literary,"
the author realizes this intention (p. 28).
The deeper problem underlying this issue has
its roots in Iser's theoretical basis for his
concept
of the implied reader. For Iser, the author as the
determiner of the work's meaning shrinks almost
to the point of extinction. Instead, the reader
creates the work's meaning. Iser believes that
the implied reader consists of both an
objec-
tively determinable structure in the text
(Textstruktur) and the varying subjective actu-
alizations of the structure by real readers
(Aktstruktur); indeterminacies in the text and in
its implied reader structure make
varying actu-
alizations possible. Critics such as Link are
baffled by Iser's statements like "the intention of
a text" lies "in the reader's imagination."'0
Such statements are less mystifying (and more
difficult to counter) when one considers Iser's
phenomenological roots, which reach back
through the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden
to Edmund Husserl, Ingarden's teacher. "Inten-
tion" should apparently be understood in the
phenomenological sense of "intentionality." The
reader-the noetic pole-"intends" or consti-
tutes the meaning of the work, the noematic
pole. Whether one views the experience of a lit-
erary work communicatively (as Link) or
phenomenologically or whether one tries to syn-
thesize these outlooks (as Iser
attempts to do-
unsuccessfully, to my mind) is a matter of
 W. Daniel Wilson
choice that lies outside the bounds of my topic.
It should be pointed out that E. D. Hirsch has
shown that according to Husserl, "different in-
tentional acts (on different occasions) 'intend'
an identical intentional object" and that "verbal
meaning, being an intentional object, is unchang-
ing."11No matter which approach one chooses,
the implied reader is a part of the overall textual
meaning and is not to be confused with the real
reader, the noetic pole who actualizes the mean-
ing and who correspondingly relates to the im-
plied reader's role.
Iser's use of "intention," however, is far from
being consistently phenomenological. On a single
page of The Act of Reading Iser speaks of "the
perspective intended by the author" and "what
the reader is meant to visualize" (p. 35). In his
practical analyses in The Implied Reader, too,
Iser is forced more than once to fall back on
"the role intended for the reader," as other crit-
ics have noted.12 Surely Iser can only be refer-
ring (or avoiding referring) to the author's in-
tentions; this position is a far cry from his orig-
inal theoretical assertion that the text's meaning
is created by the reader. Of course, we must
avoid the narrow concept of intention as the au-
thor's statements of purpose outside the work;
the intention as expressed in the work itself
should be our guide to establishing the communi-
cative structure of the work. Wimsatt and
Beardsley clearly formulated this distinction
many years ago: "If the poet succeeded in doing
it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying
to do."13 It is intention in this wider sense-as
evidenced in the work itself-that Iser falls back
on, as he should. So only if Wolff uses "in-
tended" in the narrow sense (his third criterion
would seem to indicate that he does, although
the emphasis on the intended reader "condition-
ing" the work weakens this impression) can a
valid distinction between intended and implied
readers be sustained. The distinction would then
boil down to the individual critic's response to
the age-old theoretical problem: does an author
consciously intend to create those more subtle
structures that critics uncover in his or her
works? This question remains unresolved for our
discipline generally, and the whole issue is not
very fruitful for an analysis of the communica-
tive structure actually found in the work, since,
as Stanley Fish points out, "one can analyze an
851
effect without worrying about whether it was
produced accidentally or on purpose."14
If we understand "intended" in the broader
and more proper sense, we find no essential
difference between Wolff's and Iser's concepts.
Iser asks with respect to Wolff's model "why,
generations later, a reader can still grasp the
meaning ... of the text, even though he cannot
be the intended reader" (Act, p. 33; Akt, p.
59). We may ask the same question about Iser's
implied reader. If a work speaks to a future age,
the real reader who corresponds to the reader
"intended" or "implied" or presupposed by the
text and by the author can exist in the future-
the author writes for a reader who does not yet
exist (i.e., who exists only in the author's mind
and text and who is fully actualized only by a
future real reader). Whether "intended" by the
author (in the wider sense) or "implied," this
reader is, after all, an abstraction, not a really
existing reader. He or she will almost certainly
possess various characteristics of actual readers
and reflect the author's historical setting in many
ways (the "implied readers" in the analyses in
Iser's Implied Reader reflect the historical situa-
tion of the works, and Iser never asks how we
can today, "generations later," fill these roles).
But precisely because he or she is a construction
in the author's mind and/or a structure of the
text, he or she exists as long as the book exists
and his or her role may be filled in future ages if
the work truly outlasts its time. So it will not do
for Iser to play off the intended reader as "a
concept of reconstruction, uncovering the his-
torical dispositions of the reading public at
which the author was aiming" against the im-
plied reader, who "as a concept has his roots
firmly planted in the structure of the text"-
implying that the latter, whose role "can be
fulfilled in different ways, according to historical
or individual circumstances," is somehow more
ahistorical.15 Intended and implied readers are
both "firmlyplanted in the structure of the text,"
and their roles may be realized by future readers
in favorable circumstances. An interpretation of
the implied or intended reader's role in a work
must aim at what the author intended (in the
wider sense) to communicate, and historical cir-
cumstances will condition this intention. Iser's
reliance on authorial intention shows that the
implied reader, like the intended reader, is "a
 852 Readers in Texts
concept of reconstruction, uncovering the his-
torical dispositions of the reading public at
which the author was aiming," whether the au-
thor aimed at these (real) dispositions nega-
tively or positively; the dispositions are, of
course, transformed into a fictional, implied re-
cipient. If we understand intention in the proper
sense and avoid confusing the characterized
reader with the intended reader, the implied
reader differs from the intended reader only in
name and to the degree that one attempts to
push the author out of the picture. I use the term
"implied reader" without Iser's bias and theoret-
ical presuppositions.
When I say that the implied reader is fictional,
I am departing from Iser's-and most German
critics'-understanding of the term. Walter Ong
categorically affirms my position, as the title of
his relevant article shows: "The Writer's Audi-
ence Is Always a Fiction."16 Can we really call
the reader's role-that is, the implied reader-a
fiction? Ong means two things when he makes
this claim.
First, that the writer must constructin his imagina-
tion, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some
sort of role-entertainment seekers, reflective
sharersof experience (as those who listen to Con-
rad's Marlow), inhabitants of a lost and remem-
bered world of prepubertal latency (readers of
Tolkien's hobbit stories), and so on. Second, we
mean that the audience must correspondingly
fictionalizeitself. A reader has to play the role in
which the author has cast him, which seldom
coincides with his role in the rest of actual life.
(p. 12)
Iser would probably disagree both with Ong's
emphasis on the author and (as we shall see)
with the insistence that the reader must play the
precise role the author outlines, and yet the two
models show remarkable similarities. One differ-
ence is that Iser follows the standard German
terminology, calling only the characterized
reader-the one who is addressed or portrayed
directly in the text-fictitious (fiktiv, or Leser-
fiktion). Surely Ong is correct: if this role exists
in the work itself and consists of a reader who
never corresponds to real readers "in an un-
transmuted state" (p. 10), then this reader or
reader's role is a part of the fictive world, or
fictive. Of course, one may argue that these
readers are fictive in different ways from, say,
the characters and, again, that the implied
reader is a different sort of fiction from the char-
acterized reader. I would agree, but using the
term fictive readers (not characters) and distin-
guishing between "characterized" and "implied"
(or "intended") precisely express these differ-
ences.
What are the relations of these fictive readers
to reality? Obviously, this relationship cannot be
any less complex than that between fictional
worlds and reality generally, so our response
must be differentiated. First, characterized read-
ers may be based on real persons (often in their
capacity as readers), just as any fictional charac-
ter may be. For example, when Sterne had Tris-
tram Shandy speak to the "Madam" character-
ized in his text, he may have been thinking of a
particular contemporary reading habit or even a
particular individual who incorporated this
habit. But the same transmutations occur here
that occur when any real person forms the basis
for a fictional figure. I have shown elsewhere
that although C. M. Wieland partly addresses his
Comic Tales (1765) to a "Herrn Doctor Z,"
which stands for his friend Johann Georg
Zimmermann, the fictionalized "Z" can be
clearly distinguished from his model in re-
ality.17The implied reader, too, may be based on
a real reader; following Pushkin's death, Gogol
wrote: "I have not written one line without
imagining him before me."18 And yet the real
person is transformed into a fictional role that
other real readers may play, so that the implied
reader may seem even more divorced from re-
ality than the characterized reader does. Because
the implied reader's role is fictional, Karl
Maurer rightly dismisses as deceptive any hope
of writing a historical study of reading behavior
based only on the texts and their implied read-
ers,19 since the degree to which an implied
reader reflects real reading behavior is not evi-
dent from the text alone. True Rezeptions-
geschichte is concerned with real, historical
readers, not primarily with fictive readers.20
The fictive reader is a tool for interpreting a
work, not-except very indirectly and unreliably
-for sketching historical reading habits.
In another sense the implied reader's relation
to reality is unique and central: the implied
reader incorporates the reading behavior that
real readers are supposed to adopt, even if they
 W. Daniel Wilson
fail to do so. In other words, our relation to the
implied reader is crucial to our understanding of
the text. Within this context, we can distinguish
two basic models concerning the flexibility with
which this relation is realized. Ong sees his fic-
tionalized reader-perhaps unwittingly-as a
less flexible role. He generally speaks in terms of
the roles readers are "called on" or "asked" to
play (pp. 9, 12), and, more restrictively, he says
that these roles are "enforced" on the reader (p.
10) and that "a reader has to play the role in
which the author has cast him" (p. 12). Iser's
model would seem more flexible. He asserts that
no real reader can completely correspond to the
role cut out for him or her, contrary to Wayne
Booth's suggestions that "the most successful
reading is one in which the created selves, au-
thor and reader, can find complete agreement"
and "regardless of my real beliefs and practices,
I must subordinate my mind and heart to the
book," that is, to "the self whose beliefs must
coincide with the author's."21In Iser's concep-
tion, the reader's role contains a range of possi-
bilities for realization (a Realisierungsfiicher),
allowing for varying historical and individual
actualizations.
In much of Iser's concrete textual analysis,
however, the flexibility granted to the reader-
when, indeed, it is at all as significant as Iser
intimates-can be postulated only by commit-
ting the familiar error of identifying implied
reader with characterized reader. Consider the
following narrative commentary in Joseph An-
drews, after the hero resists Lady Booby's se-
ductions and professes his "virtue":
You have heard, reader,poets talk of the statue of
Surprise;you have heard likewise, or else you have
heard very little, how Surprise made one of the
sons of Croesusspeak, though he was dumb. You
have seen the faces, in the eighteen-pennygallery,
when, through the trap-door, to soft or no music,
Mr Bridgewater,Mr William Mills, or some other
of ghostly appearance,hath ascended, with a face
all pale with powder, and a shirt all bloody with
ribbons;-but from none of these, nor from Phidias
or Praxiteles,if they should return to life-no, not
from the inimitable pencil of my friend Hogarth,
could you receive such an idea of surpriseas would
have entered in at your eyes had they beheld the
Lady Booby when those last words issued out from
the lips of Joseph. (Bk. i, Ch. viii)
853
In his essay "The Role of the Reader in Field-
ing's Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones," Iser
comments on this passage: "As the narrative
does not offer a description of Lady Booby's
reaction, the reader is left to provide the descrip-
tion, using the directions offered him."22 It is,
however, only the characterized reader-one,
indeed, whose knowledge of contemporary and
ancient culture is depicted in some detail-who
is offered any flexibility here, and consequently,
the flexibility granted the real reader is insignifi-
cant if not actually nonexistent. What does it
matter exactly how Lady Booby's surprise
looked? The narrator's comic hyperbole com-
municates the central fact and importance of this
surprise very well, and for the narrator to imply
that the reader must imagine it for himself or
herself is simply to poke fun at him or her-and
to create a characterized reader, a superficial
snob who would enjoy parading the accoutre-
ments of his or her experience of the London
theater for so trivial a matter and who hypocriti-
cally disdains the "rabble's" surprise while en-
joying (and paying a great deal more than they
for) the vulgar sort of theater that invoked this
surprise. The implied or intended reader is not
identical to this characterized reader; he or she
reacts to the characterized reader just as he or
she does to the rest of the passage, but he or she
does not follow the narrator's "instructions" to
him or her.23 Fielding's narrator calls his the-
oretical chapters "vacant pages," but this
description is deceptive: the "vacancies" and
"gaps" that Fielding and Iser mention are often
in fact the most "filled" passages. We must be-
ware of always taking narrators at their word;
Elizabeth Harries has shown that in Fielding,
Sterne, Diderot, and Wieland "most of the invi-
tations to the reader to supply part of the story,
to use his imagination to fill in gaps, are less
than genuine" (p. 145).
So the flexibility of Iser's implied reader to
play different roles seems to be based on a false
identification of characterized and implied read-
ers (not in theory, but in practice). And Karl
Maurer and others before him have pointed out
that even in Iser's own estimation "indeter-
minacy" and the reader's filling of "gaps" in a
text are historically limited phenomena rather
than general conditions for the effects of litera-
ture.24 It seems likely that the wider phenom-
 854 Readers in Texts
enon of flexibility, as Iser refers to it, is itself a
particular reader's role. When we speak ab-
stractly of the implied reader as a general con-
cept, we cannot equip him or her with individual
characteristics, such as flexibility. We must in-
vestigate each work without preconceived no-
tions; generalities about the reader's role in any
body of works (even those of one author) will
usually stumble on the insistent uniqueness of
the individual fictive world. Finally, Iser's prac-
tical reliance on authorial intention (which is
inconsistent with his basic theory) also destroys
flexibility; the reader who must uncover the au-
thor's intention or meaning is not really allowed
much leeway.
The example of Walter Ong's article shows
that English-language critics, by implication,
have something to teach German critics: all
readers within the text can be called fictive. Of
course, Ong's article can only be fit into the de-
veloping discussion ex post facto, since he and
most other English-language critics were not
overtly concerned with the characterized reader;
so they, in turn, can learn from the German tra-
dition. Walker Gibson, in an early article,
writes: "A bad book . . . is a book in whose
mock reader we discover a person we refuse to
become, a mask we refuse to put on, a role we
will not play."25 Leaving aside the dubious
equation of literary quality with our willingness
to play the implied reader's role, we can see that
Gibson overlooks the category of the character-
ized reader entirely (and that his "mock reader"
therefore corresponds to the implied reader).
The author may create a reader's role with
which we are not expected to identify, as we saw
in Joseph Andrews. Ong, too, misses this dis-
tinction. A close look at some of his examples
will enable us to define more clearly the fine
points of distinction between characterized and
implied fictive readers.
One of Ong's central examples is the opening
passage of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms:
"In the late summer of that year we lived in a
house in a village that looked across the river
and the plain to the mountains." Ong percep-
tively points out that the use of the definite ar-
ticle and demonstratives ("that year," "the river,"
etc.) in the first sentence of this work estab-
lishes a fictionalized reader who apparently
knows which year, which river the narrator is
talking about, and this reader is therefore "cast
in the role of a close companion of the writer"
(p. 13). But must "the audience ... correspond-
ingly fictionalize itself" to conform to readers
within texts, as Ong asserts? We can certainly
imagine a parody of Hemingway that begins
with a sentence very similar to Hemingway's
own, perhaps with a few signals of irony to indi-
cate that the buddy relation is being ridiculed. In
this hypothetical case, a reader would still be
fictionalized, but the real reader would not be
expected to take on this (characterized reader's)
fictional role. Rather, an opposite role, still fic-
tional, would be present, one distinguished by an
ironic aloofness toward the camaraderie between
narrator and reader that Hemingway intends
seriously. The word "narrator"must be stressed
here. Aleksandra Okopieni-Slawiniska would
seem to describe Ong's example from Heming-
way when she writes: "The narrator can draw a
very distinct picture of his conversational part-
ner without mentioning him at all."26 But
Okopieni-Stawifiska emphasizes that the narra-
tor, rather than the author, is the communicative
partner of this characterized reader. Only when
the narrator approximates the (implied) author
does the implied reader (the implied author's
communicative partner) correspond to the char-
acterized reader.
So the examples Ong gives are in the first
place characterized readers who are only coin-
cidentally implied readers. The distinction may
seem sophistic or insignificant in the Hemingway
text, where the two roles coincide, but we should
certainly not be led to believe that all readers
characterized in the text are intended to regulate
our response. In Ong's own analysis, other ex-
amples show more clearly the pitfalls of this
confusion. Ong speaks of the frame technique
(e.g., in The Canterbury Tales or The De-
cameron) as one in which readers can be shown
quite clearly how to fictionalize themselves: they
must simply emulate the reading (listening)
behavior depicted in the fictional listeners. This
correspondence is certainly probable for the
early historical development of the genre to
which Ong refers, but his claim that the frame
"is really a rather clumsy gambit" for showing
readers their roles (p. 16) ignores those charac-
terized readers who are straw men (and women)
whose faulty responses we are not meant to
 W. Daniel Wilson
emulate-as may be true in Goethe's Conversa-
tions of German Emigrants and Conrad Ferdi-
nand Meyer's The Monk's Wedding. Similarly,
Ong suggests that the audience is intended to
fictionalize itself in the role of Marlow's listeners
in Conrad's narratives (see above, p. 852).
Consider the following passage from Lord Jim,
where Marlow interrupts his soul-baring story:
He paused again to wait for an encouragingremark
perhaps, but nobody spoke; only the host, as if re-
luctantly performinga duty, murmured-
"You are so subtle, Marlow." (Ch. viii)
Is it altogether clear that we are meant to cast
ourselves in the listener's role characterized
here? I think not, and Ong's principle that we
must always do so for such roles does not hold
water. The considerable difference between
readers characterized as subtly as Hemingway's
and those in a frame narrative or in Tristram
Shandy may be summed up in the provisional
empirical supposition that readers who are char-
acterized without direct reference usually cor-
respond to the implied reader, whereas readers
to whom the narrator draws attention usually
turn out to be negative foils, which help estab-
lish the implied reader's role but which differ
from it. But the hypothetical example of a
Hemingway parody-paralleled by many real
parodies throughout literary history-shows that
the difference is in degree and not in kind.
Gerald Prince's studies support this conclu-
sion, since he has established a continuum of
characterized readers "according to their degree
of involvement in the events recounted."27 His
five major categories extend from, at one end of
the scale, the narrator as his or her own charac-
terized reader (most involvement) through cate-
gories of characterized readers who are more or
less involved with and familiar with events or
characters in the narrative and who are referred
to more or less directly by the narrator to, at the
other end of the continuum, characterized read-
ers who are not referred to directly in the text
but who may be inferred from it. Although this
last category may seem to mark the intended
reader, it does not do so in principle. For ex-
ample, Prince includes in this category a charac-
terized reader in a novel by Camara Laye in
which the narrator mentions Guinean pots called
855
"les gris-gris" and then proceeds to explain to
the reader what these mysterious objects are (p.
101). From this passage and others Prince con-
cludes that the narrator is speaking to a non-
Guinean, who does not know what "les gris-gris"
are. As in Ong's example from Hemingway, a
characterized reader happens to coincide with
the implied reader. Prince's categorization shows
that any reader who is presupposed, however
subtly, by specific passages in a text must fall
into the category of the characterized reader. We
must rely on our interpretation of the whole text
to decide whether the characterized reader is
meant to circumscribe our own response, that is,
whether he or she is also an implied reader.
Unfortunately, Prince explicitly rejects the no-
tion that the implied reader is as fictive as the
characterized reader. He asserts that the relation
between "narratee" (characterized reader) and
"virtual" or "ideal" reader (implied reader) is
not developed within the text itself.28 One of
Prince's own examples belies this notion. From
the famous chapter "Of Love" (Bk. vi, Ch. i) in
Tom Jones, he quotes the following remark of
the narrator: "To treat of the effects of love to
you, must be as absurd as to discourse on col-
ours to a man born blind; . . . love probably
may, in your opinion, very greatly resemble a
dish of soup, or a sir-loin of roast-beef." Prince
notes quite rightly that this passage can only be
comic to the reader who does not think this way
about love (p. 192), that is, to the implied
reader. But our very ability to deduce this cir-
cumstance from the text itself must mean that
the reader who does not think in this manner is
included within the text, as a fiction, implied by
the very inappropriateness of the characterized
reader who does think of love as of roast beef.
Whether we as real readers actually perceive and
play the role of implied reader is, of course,
largely a matter of circumstances outside the
text, but the interaction between the character-
ized and implied readers takes place within the
work.
For these reasons, I have chosen the terms
"characterized fictive reader" and "implied" or
"intended fictive reader." By the former term I
understand any reader characterized within the
text who exists only there. The characterization
may be achieved directly, when the narrator ad-
dresses or refers to this reader or when the
856 Readers in Texts
reader is heard to speak. But the characterized
reader can also be determined indirectly, by
uncovering implicit assumptions about a reader
in the text. Most often, the indirectly portrayed
characterized reader will correspond to the im-
plied reader. The implied reader, in turn, can be
defined as the attitudes and judgments de-
manded of the real reader by the text. The im-
plied reader cannot be deduced from specific
textual references, whether direct or indirect, to
a reader, unless the implied reader is identical to
a characterized reader. The characterized reader
can be a negative foil for the expected reader
responses, whereas the implied reader is by defi-
nition always a positively intended model. The
implied reader, to whom we refer when we speak
of "the reader's role,"29 corresponds to our
overall interpretation of the text, as we shall see
below. In principle, both these fictive readers
must be distinguished from real readers (by
which I mean simply persons outside the text,
reading it), since the former are creations of the
author, even if real readers actualize the implied
reader's role after the work is created or are
reflected in that role as the work is being created.
Various other terms have been used for what
I have chosen to call the characterized reader.
As we have seen, the most common German
term, simply "the fictive reader" (der fiktive
Leser), incorrectly assumes that the implied
reader is not fictive, as do the terms "immanent
reader" (immanenter Leser), used by Wolff and
others, and "inside reader," a term introduced
by Arthur Sherbo. Sherbo speaks of the charac-
terized reader as being "inside" the work and
another reader as being "outside." Most of the
examples Sherbo gives of the "outside" reader
are not the real reader but the author's fiction-
alization of his or her intended reader, that is,
the implied or intended reader. Referring to the
Tom Jones passage about love as soup or roast
beef, Sherbo claims that the narrator "asks us,
the 'outside' readers, to share his joke at the
['inside' reader's] expense."30 As we have seen,
the narrator's very "asking" us also fictionalizes
us. Were this fictionalization not "inside" the
text, Sherbo would not speak of it as such a self-
evident truth. Elizabeth Harries, who uses Sher-
bo's terminology, suggests (following Henry
James) that the author "makes" or "constructs"
the "outside" reader (p. 147); but surely a
reader created by the author cannot be "outside"
the work. Thus the term "inside reader" estab-
lishes a false opposition.
Following Gerard Genette, Gerald Prince
adopts the term "narratee" (French narrataire)
for the object of the narrator's message, a term
that is intended to include both characterized
readers and listeners. I feel, however, that we
should avoid jargonistic neologisms where rela-
tively self-explanatory terms would serve the
same purpose; surely it is clear that a character-
ized reader becomes a characterized listener in a
fictively or actually oral communicative situation
and that the characterized reader is the narra-
tor's communicative partner even though he or
she does not share the narrator's linguistic form.
Another of Prince's terms will prove useful. He
calls "secondary" a characterized reader (i.e.,
narratee) who reads only part of the work and
"principal" one who reads all of it ("Introduc-
tion," p. 190). Thus, Marlow's listeners in Con-
rad's works would be secondary, as would lis-
teners in other framework texts and the
correspondents in a normal epistolary novel.
Even in works with no such obvious frame, a
characterized reader may be secondary since
sections such as the preface to the reader or
notes that are part of the fiction may not be
addressed to him or her. Hannelore Link makes
the mistake of using the term "explicit" reader
(expliziter Leser) for the characterized reader:
the characterized reader may not be explicitly
characterized, as my examples have shown.31
Finally, Peter Michelsen's term "imagined
reader" (vorgestellter Leser) inappropriately re-
fers to the real readers that the author "imag-
ines" as his or her audience.32
Terms for the implied reader have propagated
themselves even more profusely than those for
the characterized reader. One of the most com-
mon terms is the "ideal reader." Iser's criticism
of this concept defines his own position more
exactly:
The ideal reader ... is a purely fictional being; he
has no basis in reality, and it is this very fact that
makes him so useful: as a fictional being, he can
close the gaps that constantlyappearin any analysis
of literaryeffects and responses.He can be endowed
with a variety of qualitiesin accordancewith what-
ever problemhe is called upon to help solve.
(Act, p. 29; Akt, p. 54)
 W. Daniel Wilson
Iser's is undoubtedly the most serious argument
against the ideal reader, but his own model has
drawn similar criticism, a response that is not
surprising when we recall that Iser's own implied
reader is in fact "a fictional being"; the criticism
affects only misuses of the concept, as we shall
see. The more pressing reason for avoiding the
term (although not the concept) is that, para-
doxically, the "ideal reader" can be misunder-
stood to refer to a real reader. If an interpreter
says that the ideal reader of a certain work
would understand such and such, it is not im-
mediately clear whether the interpreter means a
real reader or an abstract structure of the text;
thus the term is too ambiguous to figure as a
synonym for the implied reader.33Part (though
not all) of Iser's criticism of the ideal reader
stems from his own confusing it with the real
reader. He claims that the ideal reader is "a
structural impossibility as far as literary com-
munication is concerned. An ideal reader would
have to have an identical code to that of the
author," and "if this were possible, communica-
tion would then be quite superfluous, for one
only communicates that which is not already
shared by sender and receiver" (Act, pp.
28-29; Akt, p. 53). The ideal reader, under-
stood in Iser's and my own sense as "a fictional
being," is not the real "receiver," however, but a
textual structure through which communication
occurs; the "communication" between author
and ideal/implied reader is precisely a fiction, a
potential communication. Real readers do
(sometimes) assimilate new attitudes in their re-
lation to the ideal reader; from their points of
view, the ideal reader is part of the assimilated
code.
Using Link's term "abstract reader" for the
implied reader also tends to mislead: our ability
to abstract the "abstract"-or often not so
abstract-reader from the text also means that
this reader has been fictionalized in the first
place; thus, the more precise antonym for "real"
is here "fictive" and, specifically, "implied,"
rather than "abstract." The term essentially says
little; it is too abstract. Manfred Naumann, who
examines the problem from a Marxist perspec-
tive, calls the implied reader the "addressee"
(Adressat),34 which, although technically cor-
rect from a communication-oriented point of
view, introduces more jargon (in the form of a
857
term that sounds rather like a reference to the
reader of an envelope).
A few other terms might be considered ac-
ceptable alternatives to implied/intended reader.
Der addquate Leser has become somewhat es-
tablished in German criticism, although in En-
glish "the adequate reader" sounds odd (and is,
moreover, not an exact equivalent). Nelson's
term "optimum reader," like "ideal" and "adi-
quat," stresses normatively the implied reader's
qualitative appropriateness for a particular text
(a judgmental basis avoided by Iser), although
it, like "ideal," may perhaps be taken to refer to
a real reader. The "virtual" or "potential
reader," as used by some structuralists,35gives
us an acceptable synonym for the implied reader
and stresses the latency of this structure before
its actualization. The term "implied reader" it-
self has the advantages of having gained cur-
rency and, as we have seen, of corresponding to
the "implied author" proposed by Wayne Booth
at an earlier stage of the critical discussion.
Robert Crosman has pointed to an important
misuse of the implied reader, although he per-
ceives the problem as inherent in the concept
itself. Crosman argues that certain analyses of
"the reader of Paradise Lost" have led to at-
tempts to prescribe our responses in what I be-
lieve are two ways: one concerns the pinpointing
of implied readers in works historically divorced
from the critic; the other concerns the critic's
attempt to make this interpretative act abso-
lute.36 First, the critic postulates "the seven-
teenth-century reader." It is certainly valid to
attribute to the implied reader of a work from
any age familiarity with the basic knowledge and
cultural presuppositions of that age. But the in-
dividual work must determine how we evaluate
such presuppositions. If there is no textual basis,
say, for believing that the implied reader of
Paradise Lost unquestioningly embraces all the
religious tenets of seventeenth-century Puritan-
ism, then we must not postulate such a conform-
ist reader. To do so would betray "an effort to
impose on modern readers responses [the critic]
is not certain of being able to persuade them to
adopt on the evidence of their own reading of
the text" (Crosman, p. 380). Such an attempt
trivializes the implied reader into a conformist
who would probably be incapable of properly
reading demanding literature. In fact, if Hans
 858 Readers in Texts
Robert Jauss is correct, the extent to which a
work surpasses the "horizon of expectations" of
real readers of its time (i.e., the incongruity be-
tween the real and implied readers) determines
the quality of the work.37 Thus many of the
best authors would seem to write "for" readers
in the future or attempt to "create" a new type
of implied reader. The abuse of the implied
reader is most widespread here, and it is prob-
ably this abuse that Iser refers to in his criticism
of the "ideal reader." Another example: Lowry
Nelson argues that "it is a duty of the reader to
learn and fictively embrace the code of feeling in
any work of any age by the contractual exercise
of his historical imagination" (pp. 182-83); Nel-
son uses this principle to argue that we are to come
down on the side of Werther, the sincere senti-
mental sufferer. At the beginning of Goethe's
novel, the "editor" (not Goethe) does indeed
call for the "reader" to admire and love Wer-
ther's spirit and character and to shed tears over
his fate; the "reader" who suffers like Werther is
to be consoled by the hero's sufferings and the
book is to replace the friends that this "reader"
does not have. The real sentimental personalities
of some Germans in the 1770s serve as a model
for a characterized reader, but whether the
characterized reader corresponds in toto to the
implied reader of the novel-that is, whether we
are supposed to adopt the implied reader's atti-
tudes-is a matter of interpretation (and is, I
believe, doubtful). So in this example, the mat-
ter can be resolved by distinguishing between the
characterized reader and the implied reader and,
even more important, by avoiding an otherwise
unjustified identification of implied and real con-
temporary readers (just as we avoid unjustifiably
identifying the fictive "editor" with the implied
author or Goethe). An examination of the au-
thor's relation to contemporary readers may be
valuable in determining how this relation af-
fected the creation of the implied reader (as we
shall see), but this relation must not be confused
with the relation between the author and that
same implied reader; the only "communicative
partner" present during the genesis of a work is
the implied reader, who (as Ong points out) is
never identical to the unmodified real reader.
The second way in which our responses car
be inappropriately prescribed in criticism of the
implied reader is described by Crosman as "the
illusion of objectivity" (p. 380). The "implied
reader" is a structure of the text. But a critic
cannot determine the aspects or meaning of that
structure with any more absolute validity than
he or she can the meaning of other structures.
We must not claim that our interpretation of the
implied reader is anything more than our inter-
pretation. Whether one believes that absolute
"validity in interpretation" is possible, as does
E. D. Hirsch, or that objective structures exist in
the text but can never be totally elucidated by a
given interpretation,38one can still use the con-
cept of the implied reader. Properly understood,
an interpretation of the implied reader is no
more authoritative and restrictive on our own
right to establish a new interpretation than other
aspects of a work are. Each critic will believe
that he or she has uncovered the implied reader,
and recourse to textual evidence may or may not
resolve the differences.39Critical criteria such as
my distinction between characterized and im-
plied readers should partially resolve-for ex-
ample-the wide divergences among the (at
least) three interpretations of the reader's role in
Fielding's novels.40 But all differences will never
be resolved, and a reader's role is an implicit
correlate to each interpretation rather than an
easy shortcut to an objectively valid interpre-
tation.
The implied reader thus ideally contributes to
criticism that is no more, but also no less, objec-
tive or valid than interpretation generally. Fur-
ther, the implied reader is a function of no more
and no less than the overall meaning (that is, the
overall interpretation) of the text. I say "no
more" because the implied reader is in principle
not identical to real readers outside the text and
must not be interpreted with undue emphasis on
real readers and other extratextual criteria. An-
other example of such criteria is an author's
opinions about his or her work expressed else-
where than in the work; I mentioned above the
"intentional fallacy" of taking such statements
as authoritative (Wimsatt and Beardsley). A
further example, reference to other works of the
same author, shows where studies of "the reader
in the works of so-and-so" often fall short: they
generalize about the implied reader in several
works, ignoring the unique communicative pat-
tern, and thus the unique implied reader, in each
work. That pattern is part and parcel of the
 W. Daniel Wilson
overall meaning of the work. The implied reader
is thus also "no less" than this overall meaning.
For example, a passage that implies a reader
who knows, say, the works of Jane Austen might
be modified by the wider sense that the expected
response to Jane Austen's world is ironic in this
text. This example points up the necessity of
distinguishing between characterized and im-
plied fictive readers. A reader is characterized
(perhaps by an unexplained reference to a Jane
Austen character) as an Austen aficionado, but
the interpreter must determine whether this
characterization constitutes the intended (im-
plied) response. To say that the implied reader
is a correlate of no more and no less than our
interpretation of the text's meaning means that
the implied reader, as the author's perfect com-
municative partner, is necessarily similar to the
(implied) author. Thus the implied reader is
often described as a "brother" of the author-
for example, by Valery:
Tout poete se fie necessairementdans son travail a
quelque lecteur ideal qui lui serve le mieux du
monde, et qui, d'ailleurs,lui ressembleun peu plus
qu'un frere.
Every poet necessarilyrelies on some ideal readerin
his work, who serves him as the best reader in the
world, and who, moreover, resembles him a bit
more closely than a brother.41
How, then, does the analysis of the implied
reader relate to new trends in criticism? At least
two new "paradigms" (using Thomas Kuhn's
concept from The Structure of Scientific Revolu-
tions) of critical method have been posited in
recent years. According to Hans Robert Jauss,
the "aesthetic-formalistic" paradigm still domi-
nant a decade ago concentrates on describing
works of art and their objective meanings iso-
lated from their historical settings and includes
formalism and New Criticism. The new para-
digm that Jauss sees arising emphasizes the en-
tire communicative pattern of literature in a
historical context, concentrating especially on
the reception of the literary "message."42 The
concept of the implied reader would appear to
stand with a foot in each of these two paradigms.
859
It must be interpreted as a property of the text,
without allowing extratextual aspects to domi-
nate. At the same time, the implied reader is an
essential link in the line of communication be-
tween the author and every (real) reader, one
that determines to a large extent the success and
quality of the communication. Jauss, who is
counted with Iser as a member of the "Con-
stance School" of literary theory, has given his
imprimatur to the concept of the implied reader
as a primary tool of the study of reception. Jauss
argues that the implied reader, who can be de-
termined more "objectively" from the text itself,
deserves "methodological precedence" over the
study of the real reader.43 In other words, one
can evaluate a real reader's response to the text
only after determining the implied reader's role
and examining the contrast between the two po-
sitions. Gunter Grimm has criticized Jauss's
statement, with some justification; can the im-
plied reader's role in a text, asks Grimm, be
constructed without prior knowledge of the real
communicative relation between the author and
the audience? (Rezeptionsgeschichte, p. 48).
With respect to the work's genesis, of course,
Grimm is correct. An analysis of the author's
perception of his or her real public at the time
the work was written will often aid interpreta-
tion of the author's relation to the implied reader
of a text. If, for example, the text appears to
show (perhaps by its innovative structures) that
the implied reader represents a reader type not
present in the author's day and therefore that the
author was writing for a reader of the future
and/or to educate his or her real readership, the
interpretation would be supported by pinpoint-
ing both the nature of and the author's (nega-
tive) attitude toward the real readership-
without, of course, subsuming the actual textual
evidence under any of this external evidence
(including externally expressed authorial inten-
tion, toward which Grimm's attitude is am-
biguous).44
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine an author
whose creation (including the implied reader) is
not affected in some way by his or her percep-
tions of real readers.45 I believe that Jauss re-
fers to the evaluation of responses of real read-
ers historically removed from the genesis of the
work; if so, he would seem to claim that the
meaning of the implied reader is independent of
860 Readers in Texts
various "readings." In either case, the concept of
the implied reader is central both to the text's
meaning and to an evaluation of how real read-
ers relate to that meaning. In the light of the
dual nature of the concept, it is understandable
that Link has labeled Iser's model a sort of "in-
terference" between the two paradigms.46More
optimistically, we can hope that the model rep-
resents a mediation between them and a contri-
bution to each, a step toward unifying, and
recognizing the interdependence of, what Grimm
calls the produktionsdsthetisch and rezeptions-
iisthetisch points of view. From the vantage of
the Warsaw structuralists, Michaf Gtowiiiski
notes that the issues of "how the construction
of the literary work sketches the role of the re-
cipient" and of "how certain claims of the re-
cipients . . . influence the form of the poetic
work and determine its structure" are really
"complementary questions"; in this respect, the
possible "concretizations of a work" are
"equally a matter of poetics and literary sociol-
ogy" (pp. 97, 103).
The relation of the implied reader to the other
definition of a new paradigm, David Bleich's
more radical "subjective criticism,"47 is more
elusive. Bleich feels that literary critics, like their
colleagues in other disciplines, must relinquish
the illusion of objectivity and admit that textual
meaning is a matter of "negotiation" of individ-
ual reading experiences. If one believes, as Iser
Notes
1
Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1961), p. 71.
2
Link, Rezeptionsforschung: Eine Einfiihrung in
Methoden und Probleme (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1976); on p. 2, Link speaks both of the "Auswahl, die
der abstrakte Autor [her alternate term for "impliziter
Autor"] getroffen hat" and of the "Auswahl, die der
Autor . . . getroffen hat"; see also p. 28. Link's ties to
Booth are Rolf Fieguth (see n. 26) and Wolf Schmid,
Der Textaufbau in den Erzihlungen Dostoevskijs
(Munich: Fink, 1973).
3 Wolff, "Der intendierte Leser:
Oberlegungen und
Beispiele zur Einfuhrung eines literaturwissenschaft-
lichen Begriffs," Poetica, 4 (1971), 141-66; transla-
tions in the text are mine.
4 Wolff, p. 160. Wolff's criteria are
adopted uncriti-
cally by Gunter Grimm, "Einfiihrung in die Rezep-
tionsforschung," in Literatur und Leser: Theorien und
and Jauss apparently do, that the implied reader
can be determined objectively from the text,48
the concept would not fit into Bleich's new
paradigm. In fact, belief in the impossibility of
totally objective elucidation of textual meaning
(and thus the implied reader) will lead some
critics with a delusive desire for such method-
ological objectivity in literary "science" (based
on an obsolete model of natural science) to shun
the concept of the implied reader in favor of
the supposedly more objective study of real
readers.49
Common to both these new "paradigms,"
however-and to most other new trends of criti-
cism-is the insistence that literature is com-
munication. As an intermediate textual factor in
the line of communication between author and
real reader, the concept of the implied reader
can potentially mediate between the two ex-
tremes of criticism that deify these respective
poles. As we saw, the study of fictive readers is
also a logical outgrowth of investigations into
the "rhetoric of fiction." These critical tools thus
enjoy a certain ideological neutrality-save the
postulate of communication-oriented analysis-
that should render them useful to scholars on
more than just one continent.50
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Modelle zur Rezeption literarischer Werke, ed. Grimm
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975), pp. 11-84, esp. p. 75, and
by Horst Flaschka, "Rezeptionsasthetik im Litera-
turunterricht: Eine Einfiihrung in Schwerpunkte der
Theorie (1. Teil)," Mitteilungen des Deutschen Ger-
manisten-Verbandes, 24 (1977), 35-44, esp. p. 43.
5 Harries, "Fiction and Artifice: Studies in
Fielding,
Wieland, Sterne, Diderot," Diss. Yale 1973 (DAI, 34
[1973], 7191A), esp. pp. 136-46. Except for the ter-
minology (see p. 856 of my essay), this study contains
one of the clearest and most insightful analyses of
fictive readers.
6 Nelson, "The Fictive Reader and Literary Self-Re-
flectiveness," in The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. Peter
Demetz et al. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968),
pp. 173-91, esp. p. 175. At times it even seems that
Nelson's fictive reader is the real reader: "The problem
of the fictive reader [of Wordsworth's 'The Thorn'],
 W. Daniel Wilson
then, is to gauge his responsibility in reading or, better,
performing such poetry as 'The Thorn'" (p. 178). See
Harries' criticism, p. 136.
7 Iser, Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie dsthetischer
Wirkung (Munich: Fink, 1976); The Act of Reading:
A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978). Der implizite Leser:
Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis
Beckett (Munich: Fink, 1972); The Implied Reader:
Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from
Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1974).
8 Akt, p. 59: ". . im intendierten Leser als der dem
Text eingezeichneten Leserfiktion . . ."; this is oddly
translated as "a sort of fictional inhabitant of the
text" (Act, p. 33), showing the need for an English
term like "characterized reader."
9 Akt, p. 62; my translation, since Iser omitted the
passage in the English edition-perhaps because he saw
the inconsistency.
10 Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response
in Prose Fiction," in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis
Miller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), pp.
1-45, esp. p. 43; originally Die Appellstruktur der
Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung litera-
rischer Prosa (Constance: Universitatsverlag, 1970), p.
33.
11 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 218-19; see also p. 38.
12 The Implied Reader, p. 48 (italics mine); Der
implizite Leser, p. 82 ("die dem Leser des Tom Jones
zugedachte Rolle"). Link has argued at some length
that Iser's analyses of particular texts in this study
ultimately aim at the author's intention (" 'Die Appell-
struktur der Texte' und ein 'Paradigmawechsel in der
Literaturwissenschaft'?" Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schil-
ler-Gesellschaft, 17 [1973], 532-83, esp. pp. 548, 564);
Gerhard Kaiser had made the same point ("Nachruf auf
die Interpretation? Zu Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruk-
tur der Texte," Poetica, 4 [1971], 267-80; rpt. in Kaiser,
Antithesen [Frankfurt: Athenium, 1973], pp. 51-70,
esp. pp. 54-55), and Ferdinand van Ingen lists four
more examples ("Die Revolte des Lesers oder Rezep-
tion versus Interpretation," Amsterdamer Beitrdge zur
neueren Germanistik, 3 [1974], 83-147, esp. p. 137).
Iser responds to Kaiser's and Link's criticism in "Im
Lichte der Kritik," in Rezeptionsdsthetik, ed. Rainer
Warning (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 325-42. He argues
that Kaiser is still bound by "Darstellungsasthetik" and
that Link distorts and overemphasizes his concept of
indeterminacy. Nowhere, however, does he address the
charge that he himself relies on authorial intention.
13 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The
Intentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon
(Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 3-18,
esp. p. 4. See also van Ingen, p. 89, and Grimm,
Rezeptionsgeschichte (Munich: Fink, 1977), pp. 50-
54, 280-81, but neither of these critics refers to
Wimsatt and Beardsley's original formulation of this
distinction.
861
14 "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,"
New Literary History, 2 (1970), 123-62; rpt. in Fish,
Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: Univ. of Cali-
fornia Press, 1972), pp. 383-427; the quotation appears
on p. 409.
15 Act, pp. 34, 37; Akt, pp. 60, 65.
16
Ong, PMLA, 90 (1975), 9-21, shows a regrettable
ignorance of the whole German critical tradition in this
area, including Wolff, Iser, and Naumann (see p. 854
of my essay).
17 " 'Die Facher vors Gesicht!' Leser und Erotik in
Wielands Comischen Erziihlungen," Lessing Yearbook,
11 (1979), 199-226.
18 16-28 March 1837; quoted by J. Kamerbeek, Jr.,
"Drei Hypostasen des Lesers: Eine Montage," in Dichter
und Leser, ed. Ferdinand van Ingen (Groningen: Wal-
ters-Noordhoff, 1972), p. 196.
19 "Formen des Lesens," Poetica, 9 (1977), 472-98,
esp. p. 478. It appears from the context that Maurer
intends this statement as a criticism of Iser; I do not
believe, however, that Iser intends his work as a history
of real readers' responses (but see n. 23 below).
20 See Gunter Grimm,
"Einfuhrung," p. 77. Grimm's
classification of readers (p. 75) is confused and vague
and is barely improved (indeed, it is contradicted in
part) in his Rezeptionsgeschichte (1977), pp. 40-41,
where he distinguishes between readers on three levels
within the text: (a) characters in the narrated events
(presumably only when they are also readers or lis-
teners; these would correspond to my secondary char-
acterized readers); (b) on the level of narration: "the
implied reader" of Iser; this includes an "intentional"
reader (intentionaler Leser-an odd formulation in
either language), which is more or less the same as the
implied reader, but the "intentional" reader is for
Grimm a larger concept and also encompasses the
characterized reader (Leserfigur) (p. 275, n. 109).
Thus Grimm seems to commit the common error of
assuming that the characterized reader represents a
model for the real reader's response ("Identifikationsan-
gebot an den realen Leser" [p. 41]). The third level (c)
is the "addressee of the work," who is not on the level
of narration but on the level of "the work." This con-
cept would seem to be identical to Iser's implied reader,
and even to Grimm's own "intentional" reader: Grimm
writes that the intention of the author, embodied in the
"intentional" reader, expresses "alle im Text enthaltenen
Lesersignale"; the addressee, likewise, is "erschlie1bar
aus der Summe der intentionalen Leser-Signale" (pp.
40-41). Grimm's new terms relating to the author's
conception of his reader when not embodied in a text
("imaginierter," "intendierter," "konzeptioneller Leser,"
pp. 38-39) will prove useless for interpretation (his
alteration of Wolff's concept "intendierter Leser" is
especially misleading; Wolff meant his concept in rela-
tion to a text).
21 Booth, p. 138; quoted by Iser, Act, pp. 36-37,
Akt, pp. 64-65. In The Implied Reader (p. 30; Der
implizite Leser, p. 58), Iser quoted most of the same
passage from Booth but failed to take exception to it,
862 Readers in Texts
thus giving the impression that he believed that the
reader does perfectly fill this role.
22 The Implied Reader, p. 38; Der implizite Leser, p.
68. In The Act of Reading, Iser submits the same pas-
sage to a more extended analysis (pp. 142-46), but at
the basis of this variation lies the same confusion of
characterizedand implied readers.
23 Iser further confuses matters by drawing a con-
clusion directly from the sociologically differentiated
characterizationsof readers in this passage to Fielding's
concern "with catering for a varied public" (Implied
Reader, p. 38); in other words, he identifies the fictive
characterizationswith real readers-the "variedpublic"
-and these, in turn, with the reader implied in or in-
tended for the work-the audience Fielding is "catering
to." This added confusion is not surprising, since Iser
explicitly argues that the "imaginary" (fingiert)
"author-readerdialogue" gives the reader "guidelinesas
to how he is to view the proceedings," and is thus
"explicit guidance of the reader" (Implied Reader, pp.
46-47; Der implizite Leser, p. 81).
24 Maurer, p. 480; he refers to previous articles by
Karlheinz Stierle and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
25 Gibson, "Authors,
Speakers, Readers, and Mock
Readers," College English, 11 (1949-50), 265-69,
esp. p. 268. See also Harries, pp. 137-38.
26 "Die personalen Relationen in der literarischen
Kommunikation" (1969); rpt. in Literarische Kom-
munikation, ed. Rolf Fieguth (Kronberg: Scriptor,
1975), pp. 127-47, esp. p. 142. Rolf Fieguth would
probably agree; in his analysis of a passage that does not
mention a reader at all, he posits an implied "dialogue"
between a characterized reader and a narrator, a dia-
logue that is remarkablysimilar to that constructed by
Ong on the basis of the Hemingway text (p. 13), but
from which the implied reader must distance himself
or herself ("Zur Rezeptionslenkungbei narrativen und
dramatischen Werken," Sprache im technischen Zeital-
ter, 47 [1973], 186-201, esp. pp. 188-89).
27 Prince, "Notes toward a
Categorizationof Fictional
'Narratees,'" Genre, 4 (1971), 100-06, esp. p. 100. On
"narratees"(characterized readers) see p. 856 of my
essay.
28 Prince, "Introduction a l'etude du narrataire,"
Poetique, 14 (1973), 178-96, esp. p. 191.
29 In his review of Der Akt des Lesens, H. U. Gum-
brecht criticizes, unreasonably to my mind, Iser's
synonymous use of the terms "impliziter Leser" 'im-
plied reader' and "Leserrolle"'reader's role' (Poetica,
9 [1977], 522-34, esp. p. 524).
30 Sherbo, "'Inside' and 'Outside' Readers in Field-
ing's Novels," in his Studies in the Eighteenth Century
Novel (n.p.: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1969), pp.
35-57, esp. p. 39.
31 Hans Robert Jauss has more recently further com-
plicated "die gegenwartig ausufernde Typologie von
Leserrollen" by calling the real reader "der explizite
Leser" ("Der Leser als Instanz einer neuen Geschichte
der Literatur,"Poetica, 7 [1975], 325-44, esp. p. 339).
It goes almost without saying that this sort of "explicit"
reader (outside the text) is not explicit in the same way
the "implicit"reader (inside the text) is implicit. The
actualization of the reader's role does not make the
"implicit"reader "explicit."
32 Michelsen, Laurence Sterne und der deutsche
Roman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Gottingen: Van-
denhoeck und Ruprecht, 1962), pp. 15-16 and n. 9.
When Michelsen says that the "vorgestellter Leser"
can be determined "direkt aus den Apostrophen des
Erzahlers,"he clearly refers to a characterized reader.
33 Kamerbeek points out the various connotations of
the term: "dans le mot 'ideal' le seme de 'perfection
concrete' ou bien celui d' 'idealite abstraite'est actualise"
("Le Concept du 'Lecteur Ideal,'" Neophilologus, 61
[1977], 2-7, esp. p. 5; Kamerbeektraces the use of this
term back to A. W. Schlegel). Aleksandra Okopiein-
Stawinska uses the term "ideal" to refer to a real re-
cipient (pp. 143, 145).
34 "Autor-Adressat-Leser," Weimarer Beitrdge, 17,
No. 11 (1971), 163-69. The term is also used by
structuralistslike Okopieni-Stawiniska.
35 E.g., Gerard Genette, Figures, iII (Paris: Seuil,
1972), 265-66.
36Crosman, "Some Doubts about 'The Reader of
Paradise Lost,'" College English, 37 (1975), 372-82.
37 Jauss, "Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der
Literaturwissenschaft," in Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als
Provokation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), translated
in part as "LiteraryHistory as a Challenge to Literary
Theory," New Literary History, 2 (1970), 7-37.
38 Cf. H. P. H. Teesing: "Das Absolute wird zwar
nicht erkannt, aber anerkannt";"Die adaquate Inter-
pretation gibt es . . . idealiter, nicht realiter" ("Der
Standort des Interpreten,"Orbis Litterarum, 19 [1964],
31-46, esp. pp. 42, 45; quoted by van Ingen, p. 93).
39 Crosman seems at times to reject the idea of inten-
tion altogether and at other times to embrace it. But
he is mistaken to identify the concept of the "ideal
reader" with "an attempt, ... in the wake of its demoli-
tion at the hands of Wimsatt and Beardsley, to smuggle
'authorial intention' back into critical discussion" (p.
373), at least where the ideal reader is based on textual
evidence. Wimsatt and Beardsley did not argue that
intention cannot be determined by reference to the
text; they argued only that authorial intentions ex-
pressed outside the text do not necessarily describe the
structuresof the work. They accepted internal but not
external manifestations of intention.
40 See Sherbo; Iser (The Implied Reader, Ch. ii);
and John Preston, The Created Self: The Reader's Role
in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London: Heinemann,
1970).
41 "De la diction des verses," (Euvres, ed. Jean Hy-
tier, in (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 1255-56; quoted by
Kamerbeek, "Drei Hypostasen,"p. 204.
42 Jauss, "Paradigmawechselin der Literaturwissen-
schaft," Linguistische Berichte, No. 3 (1969), pp. 44-
56; rpt. in Methoden der deutschen Literaturwissen-
schaft, ed. Viktor Zmega6 (Frankfurt: Athenaum,
1972), pp. 274-90.
 W. Daniel Wilson
43 Jauss, "Der Leser als Instanz einer neuen Ge-
schichte der Literatur,"Poetica, 7 (1975), 325-44, esp.
pp. 339-40. Jauss takes the same position in his preface
to Asthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik,
I (Munich: Fink, 1977), 13.
44 For example, on page 48 of Rezeptionsgeschichte
Grimm gives special status to such intentions ("Die
Objektivation der fiktionalen Leserrolle laBt sich . . .
nur mit Kenntnis der entstehungsgeschichtlichen
Sachverhalte, einschlieBlich der extratextuellen Autorin-
tention . .. approximativ erreichen" 'The objectivization
of the fictional role of the reader can be approximately
attained . . . only with knowledge of the facts sur-
rounding the genesis of the work, including extratextual
authorial intention'-italics mine), and on page 51 he
(correctly) withdraws this status ("Diese textextern
explizit gemachten Intentionen sollten . . . mit eben
der Vorsicht behandelt werden, die der Interpretation
jedes Nichtautors entgegengebracht wird" 'These in-
tentions made explicit outside the text should be . . .
treated with the same caution as an interpretation by
any other person').
45 Michat Gtowiniskiwrites, "ein gewisser Teil der
poetischen Werke entsteht entweder gegen die For-
derungen der Empfanger oder aber beriicksichtigt sie
gar nicht und lai3t sich deshalb nur mittelbar als Aus-
druck jener Forderungen analysieren" 'a certain num-
ber of poetic works originates either in opposition to
the demands of the recipients or pays no heed to them
and can therefore be analyzed only indirectly as an
expression of those demands' ("Der virtuelle Empfan-
ger in der Struktur des poetischen Werks" [originally
1967], in Literarische Kommunikation, pp. 97-126, esp.
p. 98; rpt. in Weimarer Beitrige, 21, No. 6 [1975],
118-43). This may be true for concrete "Forderungen"
'demands'of the public but not for less obvious aspects
of the writer's relation to society. But van Ingen is
wrong to assume, at the opposite extreme, that there is
always a direct, positive relation between contemporary
audience and the writer: "Der Autor orientiert sich
an den Regelkonventionen,die er beim Leser als bekannt
voraussetzt" 'The author is guided by the regulative
conventions he presumes to be known to the reader'
(p. 131). The implied reader may represent the au-
thor's rejection of the contemporary public (which
means, of course, that they do influence the author).
46 Link, "'Appellstruktur'und 'Paradigmawechsel'?"
p. 539 and elsewhere ("Interferenz"). She is followed
by Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, "Rezeptionsforschung: Kon-
stanten und Varianten eines literaturwissenschaftlichen
863
Konzepts in Theorie und Praxis,"AmsterdamerBeitrage
zur neueren Germanistik, 3 (1974), 1-36.
47 See Bleich, Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), and "The Subjective
Paradigm in Science, Psychology and Criticism," New
Literary History, 7 (1976), 313-34.
48 Jauss: "die implizite Leserrolle [ist] an objektiven
Strukturendes Textes ablesbar"'the implicit role of the
reader can be determined from objective structures of
the text' ("Der Leser als Instanz,"p. 339). It seems as
if Jauss is here inadvertently reintroducing "objective
meaning" of texts after having rejected it (e.g., in "An
Interview with Hans Robert Jauss," New Literary
History, 11 [1979], 83-95, esp. p. 84).
49 In spite of his expressed skepticism regarding ob-
jectivity (Rezeptionsgeschichte, p. 54), Grimm's entire
system is based on a deep-seated faith in the determin-
ability of a correct understanding of the text ("die
tjberpriifbarkeiteines adaquaten Verstehens" [p. 57]).
To turn to "history" as a philosopher's stone that
would render criticism objective ignores the ambiguity
of historical evidence (one critic'sEntstehungsgeschichte
is not necessarily another's!) and the subjectivityof the
historian's point of view (to which Grimm gives token
recognition-e.g., p. 59). Van Ingen, too, calls histori-
cal data "objektivierbar"(p. 134). I mean to degrade
not historical criticism-my approach is eminently
historical-but rather a naive model of historiographic
objectivity.
50In the year after I submitted this article, largely
new essays appeared in a book whose title indicates
how close the authors' concerns are to mine: The
Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpre-
tation, ed. Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Prince-
ton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980). In her discerning
"Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criti-
cism" (pp. 3-45), Suleiman touches on several issues I
treat. She speaks of an "inscribed reader" (p. 14),
which would correspondto the characterizedreader, and
perceptively criticizes Iser (pp. 23-25), although she
ignores much German criticism that preceded her own.
Essays that I have cited by Gibson, Prince, Iser, and
Fish are now collected (in English), with others, in
Reader-Response Criticism:. From Formalism to Post-
Structuralism,ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980). Both Crosman and Tomp-
kins have assembled annotated bibliographies that are
especially comprehensive for Anglo-American and
French criticism.