Activity

The difficulty of this task for the writer, explored in the interview with Larry McCaffery and in "E Unibus Pluram," is that it cannot succeed if the reader is passive, merely swept along by the story to a satisfying conclusion. Viewer passivity was the weapon of choice of corporate media, as Walla…

In his 1978 book The Act of Reading, Iser provides an account of what happens in the mind as a reader approaches literature. He argues that reading is a fundamentally dual process, consisting of both active and passive components. Critics, with much encouragement from Wallace, have tended to imag…