act of reading and literary anthropology: an outline of wolfgang iser’s ideas

in the second half of 20th century, the german thinker wolfgang iser developed a theory of reading literary texts that opened up new horizons in literary studies. by focusing on the reader instead of the writer, iser introduced new ways of reading. he subsequently extended his literary studies, went beyond the conventional domains, and developed a novel area of research which he named “literary anthropology”. the present article is an attempt to draw an outline of iser’s major notions