The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, or, What's Literature Have to Do with It?

Abstract

The ease with which Wolfgang Iser's work on the act of reading was assimilated into US critical debates in the 1970s and early 1980s seems to make it an exception to Edward Said's observation that theories take on different meanings as they travel from one national context to another. If the work of other influential theorists at the time—Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard—highlighted their “foreignness,” the concurrent rise of a home-bred version of reader-response criticism and Iser's engagement with Anglo-American writers and critics helped him to pass through US customs as if he had nothing to declare. In fact, his work crossed the US border with such ease only because some of its key concepts were misunderstood. Helping to generate his widespread popularity at the time, that misunderstanding also contributed to the relative neglect of his work once reader-response criticism was no longer a fad in faddish America. What, after all, was to be gained by reading work no longer on the cutting edge?