Reader-Response

"For the book is no longer a material reality. It has become a series or words, of images, of ideas which in their turn begin to exist. And where is this new existence? Surely not in the paper object. Nor, surely, in external space. There is only one place left for this new existence: my innermost self"

Georges Poulet, Criticism and the Experience of Interiority (1972).


"A literary text must therefore be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader's imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative"

Wolfgang Iser, The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach (1974).

Taken from:
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994.