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February 19, 2007
EL312: I am... Superreader
I always have a concept of audience when I write. It's inevitable for me. Whether I'm writing here on my blog, for the Setonian, in an essay, or to a friend I need to know who I'm writing for. My reader is important to me, and by suiting my style to my reader I'm showing it.
What Iser is saying about readers in his essay, however, is a little different (though I was able to find some things that apply for my own writing). Readers of literature can be real, implied, ideal, or super. I already understood the concept of a real reader, I understand what Iser means by an ideal reader, and I blogged the implied reader as my term for the week, so I'd like to quote what Iser has to say about the superreader:
Riffaterre's superreader stands for a "group of informants," who always come together at "nodal points in the text, "thus establishing through their common reactions the existence of a "stylistic fact." The superreader is like a sort of divining rod, used to discover a density of meaning potential encoded in the text. As a collective term for a variety of readers of different competence, it allows for an empirically verifiable account of both the semantic and pragmatic potential contained in the message of the text (142).
Wow, so now a superreader is essentially a barometer for potential! Awesome. Whereas the real reader helps determine historical significance (if I read Iser correctly), the ideal reader is impossibly well-read, and the implied reader is a concoction of a likely reader who knows what is necessary for the literature to work, the superreader is all of these and none of these.
Thank you, Mr. Iser, for giving us so many readers to think about.
Iser, ''Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader'' -- Jerz EL312 (Literary Criticism)
Posted by KarissaKilgore at February 19, 2007 3:33 PM
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