At a time when we are warned daily against the sirens of literary theory, Wolfgang Iser is notable because he does not appear on anyone's list. He is not included among those (Derrida, de Man, Bloom, Miller, Fish) who are thought of as subverting standards, values and the rule of common sense; nor do we find him cited as one of those (Abrams, Hirsch, Booth, Graff, Crews, Shattuck) who are fighting the good fight against the forces of deconstructive nihilism. His absence from the field of pitched battle does not mean that he goes unread; on the contrary his two major works, The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading outsell all other books on the prestigious list of the Johns Hopkins Press with the exception of Grammatology (a book that is, I suspect, more purchased than read). Iser is, in short, a phenomenon: he is influential without being controversial, and at a moment when everyone is choosing up sides, he seems to be on no side at all or (it amounts to the same thing) on every side at once. How does he do it? (I might have asked, "how does he get away with it?", but that would have been to tip my hand.) The answer lies, I think, in the terms in which he conceives of his project which is no less than to free the literary text from the demand that it yield or contain a referential meaning, an embodied truth. Such a demand, Iser complains, reduces literary texts "to the level of documents" [p. 13], and thus robs them "of that very dimension that sets them apart from the document, merely the opportunity they offer us to experience for ourselves the spirit of the age, social conditions, the author's neuroses, etc." [p. 13]. The emphasis here is on the word "experience" for what is left out of the traditional or classical account is the actualizing role played by the reader in the production-as opposed to the mere perception or uncovering-of literary meaning. "How can the meaning possibly be experienced if--as is always assumed by the classical norm of interpretationit is already there, namely waiting for a referential exposition?" [p. 18]. Meaning in a literary text does not simply lie there, it must be brought out in an act of concretization [p. 21]. It follows then that the critic's "object should ... be not to explain a work, but to reveal the conditions that bring about its various possible effects," effects that require the participation of a reader in whose experience "the text comes to life" [p. 19]. As Iser sees it, the advantage of his theory is that it avoids identifying the aesthetic object either with the text, in its formal and objective self-