From Text To Reader

As the first roman of Sven Regener the novel "Herr Lehmann" has made a sensational success since its appearance. With over million copies, it has been not only rewarded by many literature prizes, but also adapted for a movie. While exploring the reasons for the success of this novel, many researchers concentrate on the humor element and the unique identity of the author and attributed the success to the humorous irony or Sven Regener self who has many fans as a well-known musician. That is to say, the success of this novel comes partly by chance. Although some researches have dealt with the aspect of reader, they are limited to the individual reading experience and don’t go forward.In this paper it is tried to analyse the successful reasons of the novel "Herr Lehmann" with an emphasis on the response-inviting structure and the reader horizon of expectation from the perspective of reception aesthetics. With this paper, I hope to give an inspiration for further research on the novel.As far as it concerns the reception aesthetics, it deals with the relations between work and readers. The German theoretician Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jaus put the response-inviting structure and the reader horizon of expectation each. The refers to the structure of the text with a mechanism to invite readers. According to the classic literature construction and unique content of a text, the structure can be into the explicit and implicit type. The latter means the estimate and expectation of readers for a literary work, which is based on their reading experience and aesthetic tastes.The main part of this paper starts with the response-inviting structure of narrative text. As far as the explicit structure is concerned, there are four classical literature constructions, namely education topic, picaresque story, metropolis context and reunion time, which are well-known to the readers and connected to their aesthetic experience. For readers their interest can be quickly developed at the beginning. Moreover, this novel is also researched from the aspect of implicit response-inviting structure by studying blank space, uncertainty and negation in the plot and figure of this novel. In this respect, it is emphasized on the multidimensional hero Herr Lehmann from whom every reader can find something familiar about himself.Besides, it is also tried to research the horizon of reader’s expectation. Based on the reviews from www. Amazon. de and newspaper and magazines, an empirical and statistical analysis is made to study the horizon of reader’s expectation and comes to a conclusion:the reunion story from western German, daily life and ordinary people and late growth are the joint horizon of reader’s expectation. They are melted with the text in aesthetic perception, reader experience and contemporary social conditions.In a word, with the explicit and implicit response-inviting structure the novel "Herr Lehmann" interests readers constantly. It combines history with reality and political event with personal ordinary. That is melted with the expectation horizon of contemporary readers.