1 See, “The Other Side of History” 156-67; and “Criticism on the Border.” Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” Ramón Saldívar In recent work elaborating the concept of “speculative realism” and its aesthetic work in relation to the social imaginary, I have found it productive to follow the always expansive and illuminating lead of Winfried Fluck. 1 This is especially so in relation to Fluck’s remarkable flair to offer lucid and plain-spoken explanations of methodological and theoretical work that seeks to pry open what he calls the “notoriously difficult, ambiguous, or enigmatic texts like Hamlet or The Turn of the Screw” (“Second Narrative,” in this volume 253). In the case of such texts, “disagreements over meaning and value never seem to subside and are rekindled with every new interpretation” (253). This “strange phenomenon” of the persistence of literary ambiguity and the never-ending task of interpretation pertains despite the increasing “professionalization of literary and cultural studies” that, as Fluck puts it, “promised to put the interpretation of literary texts and aesthetic objects on more professional and ‘objective’ grounds” (253). Dealing with the same tensions mined so eloquently in essays as early as his 2013 “Playing Indian” and a number of other important studies on reading and the imaginary, including the subject of my discussion here, “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative,” Fluck’s work still grips us today. By delineating precisely what is at issue in understanding the perpetual ambiguity of literary texts, Fluck lights up the everyday world of literary interpretation. These are matters that we normally don’t see as we literary scholars live and work it, particularly the undertaking of “role-play” (260) involved in the hermeneutical process. Fluck’s own objective professionalism comes into full display as he dissects this strange phenomenon and appraises the numerous “approaches or ‘literary methods’” (253) that emerged during the postwar era of the twentieth century. He is certainly correct in noting that with the advent of poststructuralism, “a more pluralistic view has come to prevail in which every method has a potential of its own, so that different approaches (and presumably their different understandings of the meaning and value of ambiguous texts) can happily complement one another” (254). Fluck laments, however, that the pluralistic view does not remove disagreement over textual interpretation but “merely obscures the problem” (254). How do we explain this phenomenon, then, and more importantly, what can we do about it? How may we reasonably approach a text with some confidence of “getting at the ‘true’ meaning” of it, beyond the chaos of multiple and conflicting interpretations? To help resolve this situation, Fluck assesses competing methods of interpretation and then offers his own alternative. He turns first to an area of criticism with which he has a great deal of sympathy, even if his own work is not fully invested in it, namely, “historical contextualization” (254). Historicisms, argues Fluck, hold the promise that as we learn more about the “historical context of a text and the social and political factors that shaped its meaning and form” the closer we come to the “true” (254) meaning of a text. For Fluck, the promises of historicisms old and new have regrettably not proven to be sufficient in eliminating differences of interpretation. In particular, he notes that such methods cannot explain why “texts like Huckleberry Finn can still affect us, although we live in different times and circumstances” (254). That is, historical reconstructions cannot suffice for interpreting true meanings of texts “because they cannot explain the fact that literary texts and aesthetic objects can continue to provide an aesthetic experience although the historical situation has changed” (254). Moreover, historical contexts are themselves not self-evidently uniquely interpretable. Fluck concludes that dictums such as “To ‘always historicize’ thus cannot solve the problem of interpretive conflicts” (254). Where does the failure of historical contextualization to solve the riddle of textual meaning leave us, then? This is where Fluck turns to his own preferred manner of dealing with the conundrum of the “never-ending disagreements about the interpretation of literary texts and other aesthetic objects” (254). His inclination is toward the method that he terms “A Theory of Aesthetic Experience” (257). That is, if we can agree that the only way to make sense of the inherently ambiguous nature of literary texts is by assuming that “texts are designed to do something and that their fictive elements have been arranged in the way they are in order to achieve this goal,” then “we can make sense of the texts’ elements only by postulating that they are ‘functional’ with regard to producing the particular effect we ascribe to them” (255). This is the first key to Fluck’s 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 282 Ramón Saldívar 2 Fluck makes this argument in numerous publications, including “The Role of the Reader; ” “Aesthetic Experience of the Image” in Romance with America? (2009); as well as in the previously mentioned “Playing Indian.” 3 Elaborated by Charles Taylor most centrally in Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), the shared assumptions of social imaginaries are the repositories of social meaning. See also, “What is the social imaginary? ” of the Social Imaginaries Project https: / / socialim aginaries.org/ the-imaginary-system-of-society/ . 4 See Nyström and Dahlberg, “Pre-understanding.” See also, Shionoya, “Hermeneutics.” response to the unending need for literary interpretation and re-interpretation. The concept of function serves as the fundamental element of his explanatory hypothesis concerning aesthetic experience. Fluck presses his claim further by noting that function “is useful (…) and, in effect, indispensable for literary and cultural studies” (255). 2 Sounding very much like a version of the Heideggerian and Gadamerian epistemological notion of pre-understanding from Being and Time (1927/ 1962) and Truth and Method (1960/ 1994) respectively, Fluck’s notion of function posits a reader’s pre-understanding that a text has a “political and/ or aesthetic function” as the conceptual requirement that makes them readable in the first place. As Fluck points out: “This potential of the fictional text to function as host for the articulation of hidden, perhaps only half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self provides the only plausible explanation for me of why we read fictive texts about people who have never existed” (264). These “half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self ” to which Fluck refers can be understood as constituted by a set of ideas, practices, orientations, values, fears, desires, and motives that bind societies together. They are the shared assumptions that allow individuals to aggregate as a society and which therefore carry social meaning. 3 That is, interpretation as the foundation of all human understanding, is not a direct reflection of the real world but is regulated by prestructures (vorhabe, vorsicht, vorgriff) in our internal world. These prestructures provide a prejudice or pre-understanding of entities in question. 4 For Fluck, the literary text functions as “host” for and to activate these “half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions” preunderstandings of human experience. Or, more fully stated, “This potential of fictional texts and aesthetic objects to suggest ever new, potentially unlimited imaginary analogies can explain major aspects of literary and cultural studies” (266). As reservoirs of “unlimited imaginary analogies,” texts activate in different ways for different readers the bounty of connections and correlations among motives, desires, fears, or aspirations that readers already hold as pre-under‐ standings of the shared private and social motives of the self, even if only as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 283 “half-conscious or unconscious imaginary dimensions of the self.” Moreover, this “finding of unforeseen linkages” (267) by readers between texts and their own imaginaries, “produces a second narrative that constitutes, in fact, a second text” (267). Through the unlimited imaginary analogies offered by texts, then, readers enact a transfer based on pre-understandings that are in effect “second narratives (…) through which literary texts are actualized and appropriated” (276). Hermeneutical pre-understanding is thus that set of assumptions and attitudes which a person brings to their apprehension and interpretation of reality or any aspect of it. It is also what makes texts readable because they conform to and enact a reader’s pre-understood expectations of what makes them understandable in the first place. In an article on Gadamer in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jeff Malpas similarly explains that: Gadamer’s work, in conjunction with that of Heidegger, represents a radical re‐ working of the idea of hermeneutics. (…) The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic thinking, (…) was transformed by Heidegger, so that it was now seen as expressing the way in which all understanding was ‘always already’ given over to that which is to be understood (to ‘the things themselves’—die Sachen selbst). (n.p.) Thus, according to Malpas: If we wish to understand some particular artwork, we must already have some prior understanding of that work (even if only as a set of paint marks on canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to be understood. (…) All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in (…) a prior hermeneutical situatedness. (n.p.) Several key points emerge when we consider the affinities of Fluck’s notion of “functionality” to the Heideggerian and Gadamerian discussions of preunderstanding. First, the “necessity of pre-understanding means that knowledge development is not linear (i.e., we do not start developing understanding of a phenomenon from scratch), but rather circular in character” (Alvesson and Sandberg 396). Furthermore, this circularity implies that understanding is never complete but always only sets the ground for more complete understandings. This feature of pre-understanding is one partial response to Fluck’s initial con‐ cern with the multiplicity and repetitive necessity of interpretive possibilities of a text. Rather than serving as a problematic, the inherently incomplete nature of an interpretive investigation continuously adds to the pre-understanding that 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 284 Ramón Saldívar a reader brings to a text. The more we read Huckleberry Finn, the more we and others understand its complexities and densities. A deeper and more important implication of the necessity of hermeneutical pre-understanding is that it is “primarily social-historical rather than personalhistorical in character” (Alvesson and Sandberg 397). “This is because the continuous development (and revision) of our pre-understanding occurs against the background of the specific society, culture, religion and social practices in which we constantly participate, and which we have (largely unquestion‐ ingly) taken over from others through our upbringing, education and work” (Alvesson and Sandberg 397). It may be the case as Fluck claims that historical reconstructions “cannot explain the fact that literary texts and aesthetic objects can continue to provide an aesthetic experience although the historical situation has changed” (“Second Narrative,” 254). Yet it is also true that the structure of pre-understanding underlying Fluck’s hermeneutical method is deeply social historical and implicated in any interpretive move. That is, no matter how we understand the “functional” qualities of a text that make it a readable form, that function cannot be simply determined by a singular reader being of personalhistorical in character but of necessity must rather be seen as being of socialhistorical in nature. When Fluck concludes that because historical contexts are themselves not self-evidently uniquely interpretable and that consequently the imperative “To ‘always historicize’ thus cannot solve the problem of interpretive conflicts” (254), he is not taking fully into account the fact that the social-historical nature of pre-understanding precludes the exclusion of historicity from the interpretive act. Fluck’s description of the “potential of the fictional text to function as host for the articulation of hidden, perhaps only half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self ” (264) requires that we not forget that these emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self exist fully, only, in the social-historical dimension of the social imaginary. Seeking in the act of reading an explanation for the very human desire and need for fictional texts despite our recognition that such writings are not only not true, but “practically useless” (257), Fluck embraces Iser’s explanation that we read literature not “‘for meaning’ but to have the kind of experience we call an aesthetic experience” (257). Or, as Fluck summarizes concerning his notion of function: “As interpreters, we do not encounter a fictional text first and then try to determine its function. On the contrary, we cannot interpret a fictional text without already implying a function” (255). Iser, then, allows Fluck to maintain that, “As a representation of yet unfor‐ mulated and indeterminate imaginary elements, the fictional text goes beyond 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 285 discourses of the real; as a form of representation drawing on a semblance of the real, it is more than a mere fantasy or daydream; as a combination of the two elements, it places the reader in a position ‘in between’” (262). In the footnote accompanying a preceding quote, Fluck emphasizes that “To introduce the term function as a heuristic category of analysis is thus an attempt not to anchor interpretation on ‘real’ grounds but to draw attention to underlying assumptions that guide and govern every interpretation” (fn. 4, 256). These “underlying assumptions that guide and govern every interpretation” are the key for Fluck’s notion of what he describes as “experiential aesthetics” as the basis for a solution to the chaos of interpretive ambiguity. That is, the functionality of texts in this sense cannot be explained by referring to the anchoring grounds of historical, social, or even cultural realities. Always historicizing, for Fluck, unavoidably entails the failure of interpretation since the reading function can never be historically determined. Instead, the functionality of texts in drawing attention to the underlying assumptions that govern interpretation is to be explained with reference to a reader’s own hermeneutical pre-understanding that a text has a “political and/ or aesthetic function” as the conceptual requirement that makes them readable in the first place (255). Turning to Iser’s “performative” theory of aesthetic experience allows Fluck to elaborate this notion of literary hermeneutical preunderstanding. Fluck thus notes that we read literature “not for meaning” but “to have the kind of experience we call an aesthetic experience” (257), which experience it is the function of texts to guide readers to perform. “Inevitably,” argues Fluck, “this mental construct [shaped by literary/ cultural texts] will draw on our own feelings and associations, or, to use a broader, more comprehensive term, on our imaginary” (257). In turn, from a reader’s own singular feelings and associations (“our imaginary”) these imaginary elements acquire shape and purpose to the degree that they align with “discourses of the real” (258). For this reason, argues Fluck, literary representation is not at base “a form of mimesis” but constitutes fundamentally “a performative act” (258), which discursively enacts the alignment of the imaginary with the real. The reader’s performance of an unreal figure, say, Huckleberry Finn or Hamlet, entails endowing an unreal figment with “a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies determination” (258). This staging on the part of the reader of an unreal character requires the reader allowing their “own reality to fade out” and transferring to the fictive character with “a sense of reality” (258). Or, as Fluck puts it, “The basic point about fictional texts and aesthetic objects is, then, that in order to acquire significance and to provide an aesthetic experience, they have to be brought 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 286 Ramón Saldívar to life by means of an imaginary transfer on the side of the reader” (259). The reader actualizes the meaningfulness of a text “only by drawing on his or her own associations, mental images, and feelings as an analogue” (259). In this way, claims Fluck, “Literature enables readers to enter other worlds that are different from their own but remain, strangely enough, their own worlds at the same time” (260). “In aesthetic experience, then, the transfer needed to give meaning and significance to the text in the act of reception allows us to give expression to associations, feelings, moods, impulses, desires, or corporeal sensations that otherwise have not yet found any satisfactory expression” (261) by means of the imaginary transfer enacted by texts and performed by readers, literary texts serve as mediators between “indeterminate imaginary elements” on the one hand, and the determinately objective elements of the historically real on the other hand. “Consequently,” Fluck concludes, “the time-honored opposition between fiction and reality has to be discarded and replaced by a triad: the real, the fictional and the imaginary” (262). The literary text arises from this triadic relation. One particularly significant result for Fluck of this triadic relation from which the literary text emerges is that it explains how “literary texts or aesthetic objects function as a host for readers who use them in parasitical fashion” (263). In representing worlds fundamentally different from the one in which a reader may reside, a text can provide by analogy readerly transfers between worlds that are far apart. This potential of literary texts and other aesthetic forms to suggest to readers imaginary analogies explains for Fluck “the fact that texts offer gratification for readers who live in worlds that are entirely different from the world of the text and its historical context” (266). It can also explain why different readers can read the same text differently. Fluck’s emphasis has been on the role of the imaginary as a working phenomenological element of a singular consciousness. As he concludes his discussion, however, he turns to the topic that has always animated his thinking on the role of the reader in activating and performing the meaning of a text. Vividly present in essays such as the two that I mentioned earlier, “American Studies and the Romance with America” (2009) and “Playing Indian” (2013), and that now becomes the concluding crescendo of the present one is the question of what explains in the history of American studies “the attraction that steers students and younger faculty in the direction of ethnic and African American studies” (275). In addressing this “attraction,” Fluck contrasts two competing versions of American studies. The first version for Fluck is based on an original focus of American Studies as it drew inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 287 in America. Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy was based on his sense of a “fundamental transformation” it brought about concerning the notion of “equality,” not as a measure of ideals of social or economic justice, but of the “idea of an equality of rank.” The second is drawn from Charles Taylor’s “Politics of Recognition,” which posited the view that with the collapse of the stable social hierarchies of the ancien régime a new demand arose for public recognition and the idea of the dignity of the individual and thus for a multicultural politics of recognition (273). Interestingly, in this discussion of Taylor’s concept of the imaginary, Fluck sets aside Taylor’s comments on the particular type of imaginary that Taylor terms the “social imaginary” (Taylor, “Social Imaginary” 23-30). In work such as Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), he offers a different concept of the imaginary that leads in a different direction than the one that Fluck outlines. Departing from the notion of the imaginary as the province of the singular consciousness and the phenomenology of the sovereign singular subject, Taylor proposes a radically disseminated notion of the imaginary spread across consciousnesses that are mutually constituted across spaces and times and linked by systems of symbolic coherence. Against these versions of the imaginary, Fluck offers finally a third alterna‐ tive. In contrast to both an Enlightenment subject-centered version such as Tocqueville’s and Taylor’s trans-individual notion of a multicultural imaginary, Fluck proposes a history of American studies “as a sequence of changing imaginary attachments to objects of desire that pose a special imaginary attraction” (“Second Narrative,” 274). In the course of Fluck’s scholarly life, the sequence of these shifting imaginary attachments ranged from the allure of the American modernists, then postmodernists, followed by popular culture and media studies. “Finally, and most important for understanding the present situation, it was ethnic and African American literature that proved especially attractive” to European scholars of American studies: Why that special focus? What is the attraction that steers students and younger faculty in the direction of ethnic and African American studies? (…) If, however, the main motive for focusing on this literature is a politics of recognition in Taylor’s sense, how can that motive explain the fascination (“desire”) of readers in Bamberg or Braunschweig who are not part of the group and thus cannot use this literature for their own search for recognition? Or can they? (275) Recalling his earlier argument that the allure of literature rests on its ability to create transfer analogies between disparate worlds and their distinct imagina‐ ries, Fluck questions what analogies ethnic and African American literature can 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 288 Ramón Saldívar offer to European white readers. He settles on “experiences of misrecognition or the denial of recognition” and the “ensuing narrative (…) of a transformation of inferiority into (moral) superiority, of discrimination into empowerment” (275). That is, for readers outside the phenomenological world of American racism, scenes of misrecognition can function as analogies for the major injustices they are experiencing. For this reason, Fluck concludes, such scenes of misrecognition taken out of context “can function as an analogy for readers who consider lack of attention and recognition the major injustice they are experiencing under democratic conditions” (275). There are certainly other functional ways of conceiving the work of the imaginary than the ones that Fluck describes. We could consider, for instance, the transnational imaginary as a special instance of Taylor’s “social imaginary.” If in an American context we conceive of the syntax of codes, images, and icons, as well as the tacit assumptions, convictions, and beliefs that seek to bind together the varieties of national discourses as forming a social imaginary structure, then a transnational imaginary is the attempt to describe imaginary structures emerging from the social, cultural, and political intersections of multinational populations and poly-cultural meanings conveyed by persons across nation states. Inhabitants of the transnational spaces we see developing around the globe today exceed the bounds of nationally prescribed versions of culture, economics, and politics. Current debates on the meaning of citizenship as a right of national polities have ignored the ways in which processes of decolonization and migration as well as social identities based on ethnicity, race, and gender point to the existence of social imaginaries other than those formulating national identities as the basis for defining citizenship. Or, we could consider transnational imaginaries representing a reality that does not yet exist in fully realized form but serves instead to enable the utopian visions emerging from the works of a new generation of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) writers of the Americas. The works of these writers represent a post-magical realism, post-postmodern, post-borderlands, and neofantasy transnational turn in American studies. Fluck would likely see a work such as Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2009) as exemplary of texts by “ethnic and African American” writers that are “especially attractive” to “students and younger faculty” in Europe. In a work such as Diaz’s novel we see most vividly the limits of a critical view that posits literary functionality of texts “as hosts for the articulation of hidden, perhaps only half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self ” (283). Instead of allowing European bourgeois white readers to analogically experience by transfer American “ethnic and/ or racial groups’ search for recognition” and to 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 289 5 See, for example, “Criticism on the Border.” construe their writings as a “host for articulating the reader’s own imaginary longings for increased recognition in a politically correct manner” (275), works such as Diaz’s fiction do something else. Functioning within the ethos of a social rather than personal imaginary, works like Oscar Wao have practically nothing to do with “recognition.” Instead, they require readers to imagine the nature of nationand community-formation, the ethos of justice, and the crossing of symbolic borders and inhabiting the transnational imaginary, all in the mode of multicultural fantasy and romance, by emphasizing the limits of the personalized imaginary. All this not for recognition or to encourage roleplaying but to conceive, and thus activate, worlds of racial, political, social and economic justice that do not yet exist. To get at some of these issues having to do with the disjunctures as well as the intersections, overlaps, and contact points between the Global North and South, I turn in my work to a battery of terms to describe the epistemologies of the South and other shapes of knowledge that emerge on the borders between global North and South. 5 The writings of authors from this domain between North and South draw their power from subjection and, in turn, help to give form to conditions other than those that drive the imaginary transfers Fluck promotes. As one such writer, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, puts it, “The emancipatory transformations in the world may follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric critical theory” (viii). Santos’ critique is a direct counter to Fluck’s position that: Class remains undertheorized and underanalyzed in American scholarship even when approaches call themselves ‘Race, Class, and Gender Studies’. As long as class is considered the main source of inequality, economic conditions would have to be changed in order to provide full recognition. On the other hand, if race and gender are considered the main sources of inequality, recognition can be envisioned by establishing diversity as a social and cultural norm. One need not change economic and social structures to achieve this, only cultural attitudes (“Playing Indian” 81). Under the domain of an American hemispheric critique that works within the paradigm of decolonial thought and theories of decolonization, Sousa offers an analysis that does not rely on the imaginary transfers Fluck describes which lead to scholars simply “playing Indian” rather than truly “engaging in politics” (83). Sousa expresses a critique like the one I have described as enacted in American vernacular poetics - an imagination of borderland experience in 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 290 Ramón Saldívar 6 See also, “The Search for Distance.” 7 Fluck explains: “Every text consists of segments that are determinate, and of blanks between them that are indeterminate. In order to establish consistency between these segments, the reader has to become active in providing links for that which is missing (…) [setting] up relations between their own imaginary constructs and the text” (“The Role of the Reader” 258). which exclusion from the domain of rationality and history rules. If fictional texts represent made-up worlds, even when they claim to be realistic, how is it possible for fiction to reveal something meaningful about history? This is the place where fantasy and the imaginary intersect with history, in what we might call “negative aesthetics,” following an alternatively amenable argument posed by Fluck elsewhere (“The Role of the Reader” 255). 6 Negative aesthetics refers to the potential of literature to “expose the limitations and unacknowledged deficiencies of accepted systems of thought” (256). In the case of contemporary ethnic fiction, Fluck’s notion of “negative aesthetics” allows us to conceive how fantasy functions in relation to history to create an imaginary vision that goes beyond the formulations of realism, modernism, magical realism, and postmodern metafiction to articulate precisely what is absent in realism, magical realism, and metafiction. Formally, the role of the imaginary is thus crucial to the functioning of contemporary ethnic fiction, for in allowing the experience of something not literally represented, it compels readers to “provide links” across the “blanks” created by the intentional “suspension of relations” between meaningful segments of the text (“The Role of the Reader” 258). 7 For Fluck, then, the cultural history of literary texts cannot be separated from their varying uses in the act of reception; it is a history of “second narratives.” Literary history and the history of reception cannot be separated. As articulation of an imaginary that seeks articulation, the second narratives through which the literary text is actualized have their own historically distinct patterns, and a history of the second narratives through which literary texts are actualized and appropriated at different times is therefore one of the logical follow-up projects of any attempt to understand the changing functions of fiction. Seen from this perspective, the phenomenon of interpretive disagreement and conflict, which provided the point of departure for this essay, is no longer the irritating problem that Fluck identified at the outset of his essay but becomes now, quite the contrary, the indispensable resource for the aesthetic experience of the functionally productive and intellectually fruitful gratifying act of reading itself. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 291 Works Cited Alvesson, Mats and Jörgen Sandberg. “Pre-understanding: An interpretation-enhancer and horizon-expander in research.” Organization Studies 43.3 (2022): 395-412. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London and New York: Routledge, 2016/ 2014. ---. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Fluck, Winfried. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” New Literary History 31.1 (2000): 175-210. ---. “The Role of the Reader and the Changing Functions of Literature: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte.” European Journal of English Studies 6.3 (2002): 253-271. ---. “Aesthetic Experience of the Image.” Romance with America? Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 409-31. ---. “Playing Indian: Media Reception as Transfer.” Figurationen 8.2 (2013): 67-86. Malpas, Jeff. “Hans-Georg Gadamer.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. 22 Aug. 2022. Web. 9 Jan. 2023. <https: / / plato.stanford.ed u/ archives/ win2022/ entries/ gadamer/ >. Nyström, Maria and Karin Dahlberg. “Pre-understanding and Openness - A Relationship Without Hope? ” Scandanavian Journal of Caring Sciences 15.4 (2001): 339-346. 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