ABSTRACT
The act of reading, as defined by Wolfgang Iser, is a process of “becoming conscious”: “The constitution of meaning not only implies the creation of a totality emerging from interacting textual perspectives […] but also, through formulating this totality, it enables us to formulate ourselves and thus discover an inner world of which we had hitherto not been conscious” (The Act of Reading 58). Critical reading in this perspective is no longer an ancillary activity, passively receiving the “imprint” of the text, but-in Wolfgang Iser’s well-known formulation-“a dynamic process of recreation” (“The Reading Process” 279) that allows the reader to formulate “alien” thoughts and perspectives but also to question existing perspectives and norms (The Act of Reading 147). In reading reflexively, the reader both actualizes the text, giving it significance, and constitutes herself as a reading subject. The interpretation of a particular text is thus “completed in the selfinterpretation of a subject who henceforth understands himself better, who understands himself differently, or who even begins to understand himself’ (Ricoeur 194-95).
