Prospecting

Wolfgang Iser is professor of English at the University of Constance. His previous books include The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response and The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett.

An important transitional book, usefully summarizing the past and thoughtfully mapping out the future of a significant critic's theoretical project. Modern Philology There is a much greater emphasis on the reader's function as 'performer' of the text in Prospecting than in Iser's other books. The two brilliant chapters on Beckett's fiction and drama are crucial here... Literature becomes 'play' and 'game,' and the reader becomes a performer of himself. This idea of performance becomes central to Iser's new theory. Art does not present life; it performs it. Yearbook of English Studies.