Constance School

Glossary of Terms


Reader’s response (Wirkung): is the reaction of individual, but also „collective“ readers to
literary texts. Reception theory assumes that each text is an offer to the reader giving them
material which has to be (individually) put together in coherent order by the readers themselves.
This construction of meaning by the reader is performed at every encounter with the text. It is
individual for every period and every person. The reader is also often unconscious about this
activity and tends to mistake it for a quality of the text itself.


Fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung): originating in the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
the term refers to constant change of interpretations in time. When reading, the horizon of the
reader given by the period they live in must fuse with the horizon of the text (from the past) in
order to make understanding possible. Logically, however, understanding cannot be “eternal”, but
always temporal.


Horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont): is the sum of general notions the reader carries in
mind when faced with the literary text. By means of a kind of hermeneutic circle, the general
horizon of expectation is continuously specified in the course of reading. At the same time,
however, the Constance School denies the existence of a substance of meaning of a text this
hermeneutic process could arrive at. Instead, it emphasizes the process of concretizing the meaning
of the text by the reader (as a way of arriving at deeper self-knowledge or a way of getting rid of
one’s preconceptions or prejudices).


Implied reader (impliziter Leser): is not the real reader! Much rather, it refers to the role of
the reader as managed by structures in the literary text. It attempts to capture what the text
makes the reader do when reading. Thus, it does not only involve the structures in the text, but –
in a broader sense – the communication patterns (Iser) between text and reader. It denotes the
(largely predictable) projection of text structures in the reader’s horizon of expectation
producing meaning – partly individual, partly predictable.


Indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit), and gap/blank (Leerstelle), and concretization: the scholars of the
Constance School assume that every literary text is incomplete, it is not fully determined. It
consists of a few elements we might see as islands in a vast sea of meaning. The rest are gaps, or
blanks, as Iser puts it. The reader has to – as they want to understand, they want meaning –
concretize the links between the elements of meaning, emphasizing some possibilities and neglecting
or ignoring others. Thus, meaning is produced by the reader out of indeterminate texts.