The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Implied reader

Implied reader: A phrase coined by German reader-response critic Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader (1974) in contradistinction to the “real” or “actual” reader. Whereas the real or actual reader could be any individual who happens to have read or to be reading the text, the implied reader is the reader intended, even created, by the text. In The Act of Reading (1978), Iser called this implied reader a “construct” of the text who “embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect.” Unlike the implied reader, real readers bring their own experiences and preconceptions to the text — and thus their own idiosyncratic modes of perception and interpretation. Some reader-response critics have defined the reader differently. For instance, as a proponent of affective stylistics, Stanley Fish spoke of the “informed reader” in Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972), whereas Gérard Genette and Gerald Prince discussed the “narratee” in works including Figures III (Narrative Discourse) (1972) and “Introduction à l’étude du narrative” (“Introduction to the Study of the Narrative”) (1973), respectively.