A Phenomenological Approach as the Reading Process by Wolfgang Iser

• Introduction 

According to Lawrence Sterne as quoted by Wolfgang Iser, 

“a literary text is an area where reader and author participate in the game of imagination i.e. when everything is ‘told’ the reader has no role to play in the act  of reading. Therefore, a literary text should ‘engage’ the reader into imaginative. participation Reading becomes a pleasure only when it is active and creative.”

Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and analysis of the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness. Such reflection was to take  place from a highly modified "first person" viewpoint, studying phenomena not as  they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl  believed that phenomenology could thus provide a firm basis for all human knowledge including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science" of measurable perception. 

The work of literature is text and the reader's response According to phenomenology, when considering a literary work one must  examine not only the text but the response it evokes in the reader. A text has the  artistic pole, which is the text as created by the author, and the aesthetic pole- the  text as realized, or responded to, by the reader. The literary work then is more than just the text- it is something abstract that is between the text and the readers'  response to it.

A work of literature is thus inherently dynamic. It changes depending on the reader The text allows the reader to imagine for himself some of the components  of the narrative. This is important in holding the attention of the reader.

➢ The text changes during reading as the reader modifies his expectations of it

A text is comprised of sentences. These serve to create the world within a work of fiction All sentences offer ambiguity, or fluidity, a meaning beyond the obvious  literal one and it is through these that the reader may become an active participant  inthe reading process. It is through these lenient sentences that the content of the  text comes across. The sentences serve as foreshadowers of future events to the reader The reader thus actively predicts what is to come, modifying his  expectations as he encounters new sentences. These sentences also have  retrospective importance to the reader (he modifies his views of prior events  based on new ones). A text in which the reader is easily able to predict the plot (where the reader doesn't modify his expectations) is considered inferior. It  becomes boring.

The same text creates different worlds for different readers. It engages the  imagination and creativity of the reader. This attribute is the virtual ability of the  text-the "coming together of text and imagination". Virtuality is created by anticipation and retrospect on the readers' part.

When consecutive sentences easily thread together the reading is fluid. But when  a sentence doesn't make sense in the context of the previous one the reader is  forced to stop and consider it, and make sense of it for the fluid reading to continue This blockage of sense in a story, this interruption of flow is an  opportunity for the reader to be active, and make sense of the sentence by "filling  inthe gaps left by the text itself". No one reading will ever fulfill the potential of a text because of the variability in different readers' reactions to the same text. 

This is true also to the same reader reading a text twice. This difference in  reactions is attributed to the changes that occur in the reader over time- but the  text must inherently allow for such difference.

The inherent interactivity of a text and the difference between readings demands  that the reader contribute from his own experience to the reading of the text. ,Paradoxically he must contribute from his own experience in order to comprehend a reality different from his (that of the story).

➢ The reader writes part of the story in his head

The author sets guidelines for the reader but the reader fills in the blanks with his imagination By definition, one can only imagine things that are not there. The  reader may imagine a set of possibilities as opposed to one particular thing. A literary work is thus the sum of the text and the sum of the text that is not there (which enlists the reader's imagination).

➢ The reader seeks unity in a text

A text offers much potential. The reader must reconcile all the possibilities to get a clear unified sense of the text. The reader compares different parts of the texts to  gain achieve this consistency. He does this through the illusions that the text creates Again this unity is not inherent in the text but lies somewhere between the  text and the consciousness of the reader. Here too there is modification of the ,illusion and throughout the reading the "gestalt" (sense of wholeness of the text)  changes-otherwise the reader loses interest.

➢ The literary work induces change in the reader

A literary text is effective when it creates expectations rooted in familiarity and  negates them in the text, creating for the reader something unfamiliar. The reader  is forced to modify his preconceptions to keep up with the illusion that the text creates This induces a change in the reader.

The division between reader and writer becomes blurred while reading a text, because the reader takes someone else's ideas and immerses himself in them. The  reader shuts out his own sense of self and becomes someone he is not. "As we ,read there occurs an artificial division of our personality because we take as a theme for ourselves something that we are not". There is the personality of the reader which is immersed in the story and is subject to the author's thoughts and  there is the previously existing self.

"You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something- George Bernard Shaw. Iser expounds:

1. You lost the inability to do that thing (or the lack of knowledge of the thing) any change causes pangs of nostalgia, of fear of that change

2. It implies relearning. You lost the wrong way to do it by learning the right way,  or the old way by learning the new way. In accordance with 1, you will never do anything according to the old way- now your new way dominates your behavior.

➢ Conclusion 

To conclude one can say that The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach is all  about the process of reading and how a reader passes through it and the theory has  logically connection with the process in the mind of reader while reading and after  reading the text.