ABSTRACT
For Iser, writing at a time of perceived crisis in literary studies, the explanatory power of traditional literary criticism had waned as its hermeneutical activity failed to reduce works of modern art to, as Weber puts it, established 'norms of unity, order, and harmony'. Weber scans The Act of Reading once more in order to demonstrate, not for the first time, that the texts resorted to by Iser to provide illustrations in regard to his theory in fact yield implications very different from those Iser would wish them to convey. 'Caught in the Act of Reading' indicates, then, the limitations inherent in theorizing the process of reading according to conceptions of the literary text as intentional object. Weber draws attention to the transformative, altering power and, indeed, the disruptive force of such repetition which is precisely not a 'proper' one; a repetition which is, undecidably, both properly improper and improperly proper in regard to that which it repeats.
