Iser's Act of Reading

Critiquing a Critique: Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading Texts on critical theory present an interesting challenge when one sits down to critique or review them. The purpose of these texts is to persuade the reader that all texts should be read and critiqued in the manner described within its pages. The process of evaluating such a book based on criteria that the reader has already established is made much more difficult by the …

…text or to grant the reader freedom in discovering the meanings behind texts if the manner in which the reader approaches texts is described by a theory. Both Iser’s theory is destroyed by his own text that proves, upon review, that literary theories do not promote complete freedom of interaction or thought when they dictate how a reader thinks. Works Cited Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978. 4, 5, 21, 140.