Literature · Literary Theory & Criticism
A topic within Literary Theory & Criticism, itself one of 12 topics in that field and part of Literature.
2 works
Wolfgang Iser
Reading is a phenomenological transaction rather than a decoding: a literary text is deliberately full of gaps, and meaning is produced only when the reader's imagination fills them in, so the same text yields a different concrete experience for every reader.
Stanley Fish
Texts have no meaning independent of interpretation, but interpretation is not therefore arbitrary: readers belong to interpretive communities that share reading strategies in advance, and it is that shared community, not the text or the isolated reader, that fixes what a passage can be made to mean.