The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast the role of the subject and subjectivity for aesthetic reception and/or production in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and in Wolfgang Iser's "Interaction Between Text and Reader." The research will set forth the cultural context in which each theory surfaces and the manner in which each commentator defines relevant terms, and then discuss how their concepts and theories can be operationalized in selected texts and thereby contribute to understanding and clarification of them.
Eagleton is at some pains to discuss the controversy that surrounded the continuum of development from sundry prestructuralist to poststructuralist critical approaches denying the relevance of psychosocial history of the creators of literature to their literary artifacts. In various ways, various exponents of close examination of text have held that the text, not the attributes of its creator, is paramount. As Eagleton says of F.R. Leavis, "practical criticism," and "close reading," for example:
There was no need to examine the work in its historical context, or even discuss the structure of ideas on which it drew. It as a matter of assessing the tone and sensibility of a particular passage "placing" it definitively and then moving on to the next (Eagleton 37-8).
The case is rather different, however, for poets and novelists on one hand and their most cogent critics on the other. It is helpful--as Eagleton does, at some length--to position in historical context the intellectual history informing critical theory that grew up around the exercise of lending the moral weight of academic discipline to the project of poetic interpretation. In that regard, it is therefore useful to recognize that Immanuel Kant's intellectual context is the Enlightenment, the period spanning the 18th and much of the 17th century in which leading intellectuals and philosophers valorized the existence and application of h...