Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: a theory of aesthetic response, (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978; hardback £8.95. ISBN 0 7100 0033 2).

Literature education as a school for thinking: Students' learning experiences in secondary literature education

“…Second, refamiliarization may boost "[…] anticipatory reading [that] enables readers to monitor their ongoing response to the text and to shape its significance as new events fall within the scope of the anticipation (or fail to do so)" (Miall & Kuiken, 2002, p. 227). Monitoring one's response to textual events that either defy or confirm expectation, implies conscious inferencing, to fill the "gaps" and "indeterminacies" that a literary work typically invites its readers to fill (Iser, 1978), which contrasts the automatized inferencing that System 1 provides (Evans, 2010).…”

“…Such a combinatorial stance indicates that our participants may have held transactional epistemic beliefs, which constitute the position that readers should interact with the author and the text to form a possible meaning out of manifold, as opposed to transmission beliefs, that refer to the idea that there is only one correct author's message to be reconstructed by the reader (Shraw & Bruning, 1996). Other research suggests that the former kind of beliefs may arise through readers' confrontations with the gaps and inconsistencies that are a hallmark of literary texts (Iser, 1978) and that may increase readers' "flexibility of internal models of meaning" (O'Sullivan, Davis, Billington, Gonzalez-Diaz & Corcoran, 2015). As comparing and combining meanings can be seen as an act of cognitive decoupling, which is said to be System 2's defining trait (Evans & Stanovich, 2013), this combining of meanings instead of determining the one meaning, is another indication that the literature course contributes to cultivation of inhibition of System 1processes.…”