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Page 47
posal of Booth but elaborates his suggestion on the basis of a different tradition (Ingarden, Gadamer, Jauss). Iser was also largely influenced (as it is demonstrated by the bibliographical references of Der implizite Leser (1972) by the Anglo-Saxon theorists of narrativity (well known by Todorov and Genette) and by Joycean criticism. One finds in Iser's first book few references to the structuralistic lineage (the only important source is Mukarovsky). It is only in Der Akt des Lesens (1976) that Iser brilliantly (and better informed than his structuralistic colleagues) tries to reconnect the two lineages, with references to Jakobson, Lotman, Hirsch, Riffaterre, as well as to some of my remarks of the early 1960s (see Eco 1962a). Such an insistence on the moment of reading, coming from different directions, seems to reveal a felicitous plot of the Zeitgeist. And, speaking of the Zeitgeist, it is curious that at the beginning of the 1980s Charles Fillmore, coming from the autonomous and different tradition of generative semantics (critically reviewed), wrote the essay "Ideal Readers and Real Readers" (1981)without any conscious reference to the aforementioned debates.
Certainly all these author-reader oppositions do not have the same theoretical status (for a brilliant map of their mutual differences and identities, see Pugliatti 1985). However, the most important problem is to ascertain whether such a reader-oriented atmosphere really represented a new trend in aesthetic and semiotic studies or not.
As a matter of fact, the whole history of aesthetics can be traced to a history of theories of interpretation and of the effect that a work of art has on its addressee. One can consider as response-oriented the Aristotelian Poetics, the pseudo-Longinian aesthetics of the Sublime, the medieval theories of beauty as the final result of a "vision," the new reading of Aristotle performed by the Renaissance theorists of drama, many eighteenth-century theories of art and beauty, most of Kantian aesthetics, not to speak of many contemporary critical and philosophical approaches.
In his Reception Theory (1984), Robert Holub ranks among the precursors of the German reception theory (a) Russian Formalists, with their notion of "device" as the way in which the work of art elicits a particular type of perception; (b) Ingarden's attention to the reading process, his notion of the literary work as a skeleton, or "schematized structure," to be completed by the reader, and his idea, clearly due to Husserl's influence, of the dialectics between the work as an invariant and the plurality of profiles through which it can be concretized by the interpreter; (c) the aesthetics of Mukarovsky; (d) Gadamer's hermeneutics; and (e) the early German sociology of literature.

 
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