Abstract
Every story omits certain details for reasons of economy or effectiveness. Wolfgang Iser called these programmatic omissions “gaps” and ruled that readers were encouraged to fill them in with a range of possibilities, but not just any possibility. This essay considers the hermeneutics of gaps (what counts as correct and incorrect fillings of gaps? to what extent are gaps medium-specific?), the phenomenology of gaps (how much freedom do we have in filling in gaps? to what extent are we able, and to what extent obliged, to fill them in? must we fill in every gap, and if not, how can we tell which gaps to leave blank?), and the erotics of gaps (to what extent do gaps define the ways we read different texts? in what ways does the pleasure we take in texts depend on gaps?).
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Leitch, T. (2017). Mind the Gaps. In: Grossman, J., Palmer, R. (eds) Adaptation in Visual Culture. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58580-2_4
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