Restricting The Role Of The Text To The Reader

Wolfgang Iser’s study journey of Reception Aesthetics generates from New Criticism and Narrative Theory, and his effect study, in the whole "text-reader" study of reception aesthetics, focuses on the text itself and its effect, that is, what the text can do about the reader or further how the text exerts its restriction function on the reader in their relationship of dialogue and communication.The paper contains three parts and intends to explore the text’s restriction function on reader on the basis of Iser’s phenomenological view of text. In the first part the author explores the phenomenological view of text so as to lay the foundation for the whole theory of the paper. The second part is the most important part of the paper, and in this part the author profoundly analyzes the text’s restriction function on reader from the aspects of text speech act, text structure, and the implied reader. Iser studies the characteristics of literary text from the perspective of pragmatics through the Speech Act Theory, and then develops the conclude that literary language possesses the essential characteristic of illocutionary acts and at the same time it possesses its own traits; therefore, the effect of communication between text and reader is restricted by the text speech act. Iser investigates thoroughly the role of reader through the phenomenological method and then cultivates the concept of implied reader, which emphasizes fundamentally text’s function on reader from the aspects of guiding and restricting. The response-inviting structure, an essential concept in Iser’s text theory, generates from the perspective of phenomenology and the "strategy", a significant branch of it, restricts reader’s activity of idealization, besides, the organic components of qualitative framework,"blank" and "disavowal", operate their restriction function in the whole communication process. In the last part, the author mainly explores the paper’s contributions to reception aesthetics and literary theory, and the guiding significances for literary criticism and literary creation.