The Study On Wolfgang Iser’s Reception Aesthetics Thoughts

In the 1960 s,under the influence of domestic and international changes,the tendency of politicization in Germany gradually became dominant,aesthetics and literary theory criticism also merged with the rapid “politicization” of philosophy and literary thought.There was a growing sense that the “text-centered” formalist theoretical proposition could no longer answer the question of the social function and effect of literature,and the issue of the reception and effects of literary texts has become an important area of research in contemporary Western aesthetic criticism.Wolfgang Iser’s thought on the aesthetics of reception was born in this context.As one of the two major founders of German reception aesthetics,Iser,on the basis of inheriting and carrying forward the aesthetic theories of Ingarden,Shklovsky,Mukalovsky and others,creatively put forward a series of “summoning structure”,“wandering point of view” and other series of terms with the characteristics of reception theory,the construction of his reader-centered aesthetic theory system of reception,the realization of the history of Western aesthetic criticism from the focus of research“text-centered” to “reader-centered”,and with the distinctive phenomenological color and its own “reader’s view”,“textual view” and “meaning view” with distinct phenomenological and theoretical characteristics have opened an important stage of development of “reader-centeredness” in the history of contemporary Western aesthetic criticism.This thesis attempts to make a systematic construction of Iser’s aesthetic thought of reception.First,it reviews the origins of Iser’s thought on reception aesthetics and links the birth and development of its theoretical construction to the social reality of Germany in the 1960 s,in order to highlight the realism and practicality of this theory.Then,we examine the unique theoretical construction with a distinct humanist spirit that Iser carried out by raising the banner of “reader-centeredness” theory.In terms of readership,he creatively introduces the phenomenological concept of the “implied reader”.The“implied reader” is a kind of hypothetical and possible reader,a reader who is consistent with the direction of the text structure and plays an important role in generating the meaning of the text.In his view of the text,he proposes the “evocative structure of the text” characterized by the “gaps” and “undefined points” in the literary text.It is the evocative structure of the text that enables the aesthetic response of the reader as the receiving subject to be completed.In terms of meaning,the production of textual meaning is a dynamic aesthetic composition of communication and interaction between the author and the text.In this process,the reader as the receiving subject gives full play to his subjective initiative in the process of aesthetic response,by calling on his own“storage” and the text “strategy” of interpretation,through the “wandering point of view ”.The text’s meaning is finally “realized” through the meaningful connection of the structural components of the text.Finally,the contemporary value and shortcomings of Iser’s aesthetic thought on reception are objectively expounded in order to gain insight into the whole picture of his aesthetic thought.Iser’s theory of reception aesthetics focuses on the connection between aesthetics and reality from the perspective of the receptive subject,thus achieving a comprehensive and dialectical grasp of the essence of literature and art,and becoming a pioneer of the times in the aesthetic transformation of the 1960 s in Germany.Today we can still see the profundity and uniqueness of his theories when we look back at his ideas on the aesthetics of reception.Especially in the current era of rapid development of the electronic media,the text as the object of reception is no longer limited to literary texts,but page turning e-books,short videos,film and television works,etc.have become “texts” that can be appreciated;the reader as the subject of reception is no longer limited to the “knowledgeable reader”,but have been displaced from the “niche”to the “mass”.This brings new opportunities and challenges for the development of Iser’s theory of reception aesthetics.Although there are still some limitations in Iser’s aesthetics of reception,it is still a milestone in the development of contemporary Western aesthetics.