Texts on critical theory present an interesting challenge when one sits down to critique or review them. The purpose of these texts is to persuade the reader that all texts should be read and critiqued in the manner described within its pages. The process of evaluating such a book based on criteria that the reader has already established is made much more difficult by the fact that the focus of the book is to explain, in the majority of the cases, why the criteria being used is inferior to what the book itself recommends. How then, does one approach the problem that surrounds critiquing an instructional text on how to critique?

The simplest way to approach the dilemma is to establish whether or not the points made by the author are valid, regardless of whether or not the reader agrees enough with the other to adopt his style of criticism. In this particular case, the author, Wolfgang Iser, is attempting to convince his readers that an approach he calls "aesthetic response" is the proper way to read and critique texts. Iser claims that his style is universal and can be applied to virtually all forms of writing. For this to be true, then one of the books written

But if we are absorbed into an image, we are no longer present in a reality-instead we are experiencing what can only be described as an irrealization, in the sense that we are preoccupied with something that takes us out of our own given reality. This is why people often talk of escapism with regard to literature, when in actual fact they are only verbalizing the particular experience they have undergone. (140)

Iser believes that the building of the mental image is the key action required to fully allow the reader to be detached from the reading and be able to watch the experience as it occurs.

In other words, texts would not be useful to a person after having been read by a single person a single time. If Hamlet had but one underlying meaning, then after the person to have ever read or seen the play discovered the meaning, then the rest of us would have nothing left to do. The play would have already been stripped of its purpose and we would be left with empty pages.

...If the critic's revelation of the meaning is a loss to the author...then meaning must be a thing which can be subtracted from the work. And if this meaning, as the very heart of the work, can be lifted out of the text, the work is then used up-through interpretation, literature is turned into an item for consumption. This is fatal not only for the text but also for literary criticism, for what can be the function of interpretation if its sole achievement is to extract the meaning and leave behind an empty shell? The parasitic nature of such criticism is all too obvious... (4-5)

Iser's aesthetic response theory contains is based on several points. First, the purpose of the reader is not to attempt to discover the single, hidden meaning within a text. The author backs up his position by providing this explanation:

The Act of Reading, while not being based on the author's life story, is based on one of the author's theories for life. Due to the fact that the book seeks to persuade the reader into adopting the aesthetic response theory, the text is saturated with the beliefs of the author. The reader cannot ignore them, because they are the lifeblood of the text, without them there is no book.

The reader does not have a set of blueprints set in front of him or herself that provides detailed instructions on how to excavate the meaning from the work. The reader cannot approach the text in an attempt to compare it to something familiar, for each text is inherently unfamiliar to the reader since the potential meaning of the work ha

Some common words found in the essay are:
Act Reading, Sigmund Freud, Reading Texts, Wolfgang Iser, University Press, meaning text, act reading, aesthetic response, aesthetic response theory, mental images, response theory, allow reader, potential meanings, own text, response theory read, theory iser's, read critiqued manner, interaction text, critiqued manner described,
Approximate Word count = 1713
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)