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Contemporary Western Literary Theory（10） Hao Guilian, Ph.D. Yunnan Normal University Spring, 2012 The Act of Reading Wolfgang Iser Reader Real Reader Hypothetical Reader Psychologically Describable Reader Reader As Heuristic Models Real Reader The “real readers”, or members of a particular reading public, are historically real people. To reconstruct these readers, one needs to know, among other things, the norms (both literary and social) of their time, their emotions and attitudes aroused by the work, and the critical judgments they passed on it. Here Iser must have in mind the work of his colleague H.R. Jauss, whose “aesthetics of reception” deals chiefly with the “history of responses”. Hypothetical Reader Unlike the real historical reader, the hypothetical reader owes its existence to the critic when the latter creates it as the receiver of the potential effect of a particular work. There are two types of the hypothetical reader (as shown in the diagram), but what concerns Iser more is the first type, the ideal reader, because the second type, the contemporary reader, though often casually mentioned by critics, is difficult to specify. Unlike the real reader and the contemporary reader, the ideal reader is a “fictional being” that crops up now and then in discussions of contemporary theory, often with different references and implications. P.J. Rabinowitz, for instance, defines it as theoretical models (such as G. Prince’s “narratee”, W. Gibson’s “mock reader”, and even Iser’s “implied reader”) that help to show the ideal operation or processing of the text. The Psychologically Describable Reader The reader in this category refers to one “whose psychology has been opened up by the findings of psychoanalysis” (Iser, 1987, pp.27-28). The typical psychoanalytical reader is found in the work of N. Holland, who defines his psychoanalytical reading