Reception Theory (Wirkungstheorie) German literary theorist Iser, Wolfgang’s term for his theory of the reader’s construction of texts. As Iser points out in his seminal work, Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (1976), translated as The Act of Reading (1978), Reception Theory is interested in trying to understand the actual process of reading itself, in contrast to chiasmus’s Reception Aesthetics, which is interested in how existing texts are read and responded to. Its key ontological assumption is that the text does not properly exist until it is read, which is to say it exists only in the moment of reading. It is this productive moment that Reception Theory tries to understand and articulate by drawing on and adapting the conceptual resources of phenomenology. Its key question is: how and under what conditions is a text meaningful to a reader? Iser’s answer is that as readers we passively synthesize images on the basis of what we read---this means we form images in our minds as they come to us, not as a deliberate, intentional, or conscious act. We constantly adjust these images as new information comes to hand. In doing so, we must push to the background our own thoughts and memories and thus allow what we are reading to occupy the foreground. This process has the effect of alienating our own thoughts, thereby putting them into a fresh perspective. According to Iser, then, this is what makes reading ‘improving’ in a moral and ethical sense. It is worth adding the following caution: Wirkungstheorie is sometimes translated as reader-response theory (indeed, Iser himself suggests response as the most viable translation of Wirkung), but in spite of similarities it is not the same thing. See also reader-response criticism; reception aesthetics. Further Reading: R. Holub Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (1984).