SOURCE: Schwab, Gabriele. “‘If Only I Were Not Obliged to Manifest’: Iser's Aesthetics of Negativity.”¹ New Literary History 31, no. 1 (winter 2000): 73-89.

In the following essay, Schwab explores connections between Iser's original theory of reader-response and his later focus on literary anthropology.

I. Fictionality and Negativity: Connective Tissues in Iser's Work

In relation to the empirical world, the imaginary as otherness is a sort of holy madness that does not turn away from the world but intervenes in it.²

[N]egativity provides the structure underlying the interaction between text and reader.³

The two epigraphs chosen for this essay contain in a nutshell the most pressing concerns in Iser's work. Literature as an instrument of “holy madness” figures as a kind of cultural broker whose main role consists in intervening in the empirical world. Defying ontology, fiction, Iser asserts, is most tangible in its impact on the reader: “The more...