Memorial Page for Wolfgang Iser

Wolfgang Iser (22 July 1926 in Marienberg; died 24 January 2007 in Konstanz) was a German scholar of English literature and literary theory. He is associated with the Constance School and worked on aesthetic response, the role of the reader and, later, literary anthropology.

Studies and early teaching

Iser's school years fell during the National Socialist period. After the Second World War he studied Romance and English philology, German literature, philosophy and psychology in Leipzig, Tübingen and Heidelberg. In 1950 he received his doctorate in Heidelberg with a dissertation on Henry Fielding. He then went to England as a lecturer and deepened his engagement with English-language modernism.

Würzburg, Cologne and Konstanz

In 1957, Iser completed his habilitation in Heidelberg with a study of the aesthetic in the fin de siècle. He then taught in Würzburg and, from 1963, in Cologne. With Hans Blumenberg, Clemens Heselhaus and Hans Robert Jauss, he founded the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik in 1963. From 1966 to 1991 he taught at the University of Konstanz.

Aesthetic response

In Konstanz, Iser developed his theory of literary effect. His central books include Der implizite Leser and Der Akt des Lesens. Iser asked what happens when people read: a literary text leaves connections open and contains gaps that readers fill. Meaning arises through the movement between textual structure, expectation and imagination.

Fiction and anthropology

Iser later expanded these questions into a theory of the fictive. In Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre, he examined why people form fictions and what functions they have for perception, a sense of possibility and self-interpretation. His writing connected English studies, aesthetics, hermeneutics, philosophy and cultural theory.

International teaching

From 1978 onward, Iser held a permanent visiting appointment at the University of California, Irvine. He also taught in the United States, the Netherlands, Israel, Canada, Basel and Princeton, among other places. In 1973/74 he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Wolfgang Iser died on 24 January 2007 in Konstanz.