THE READING PROCESS. THE PROBLEM OF MEANING.
Plato considered poetry inferior, too far removed from reality. Poets were not to be trusted.
Authors could only imitate reality in an imperfect way. Aristotle struggled to offer the necessary steps for the
effectiveness of drama: catharsis, to pull emotions (violence, passion) out of the audience in an orderly
way. The Romantics shifted the importance from the text to the author, while the Modernists shifted
importance back to the text. So, finally, where is the meaning of a text located? Is it in the author, in the
text or in the audience?
Any person or text can only 'mean' within a set of preexisting, socially supported ideas, symbols,
images, ways of thinking and values. In a sense there is no such thing as a 'personal' meaning; although
we have different experiences in our lives and different temperaments and interests, we will interpret the
world according to social norms and cultural meanings -- there's no other way to do it.
We may have as evidence for meaning what the author said or wrote about the work, but this is not always
reliable. Authorial intention is complicated not only by the fact that an author's ways of meaning and of
using literary conventions are cultural, but by the facts that the author's work may very well have taken her
in directions she did not originally foresee and have developed meanings which she did not intend and
indeed may not recognize (our historical records are full of authors attesting to this), the works may embody
cultural or symbolic meanings which are not fully clear to the author herself and may emerge only through
historical or other cultural pespective, and persons may not be conscious of all of the motives that attend
their work.
Does the meaning, then, exist 'in' the text? There is an argument that the formal properties of the
text--the grammar, the language, the uses of image and so forth--contain and produce the meaning, so that
any educated (competent) reader will inevitably come to essentially the same interpretation as any other.
Of course, it becomes almost impossible to know whether the same interpretations are arrived at because
the formal properties securely encode the meaning, or because all of the 'competent' readers were taught
to read the formal properties of texts in roughly the same way. As a text is in a sense only ink-marks on a
page, and as all meanings are culturally created and transferred, the argument that the meaning is 'in' the
text is not a particularly persuasive one.
The meaning might be more likely to be in the conventions of meaning, the traditions, the cultural codes
which have been handed down, so that insofar as we and other readers (and the author) might be said to
agree on the meaning of the text, that agreement would be created by common traditions and conventions
of usage, practice and interpretation. In different time periods, with different cultural perspectives (including
class, gender, ethnicity, belief and world-view), or with different purposes for reading no matter what the
distance in time or cultural situation, competent readers can arrive at different readings of texts. As on the
one hand a text is an historical document, a material fact, and as on the other meaning is inevitably cultural
and contextual, the question of whether the text 'really means' what it means to a particular reader, group
or tradition can be a difficult and complex one.
Does the meaning then exist in the reader's response, her processing or reception of the text? In a
sense this is inescapable: meaning exists only insofar as it means to someone, and art is composed in
order to evoke sets of responses in the reader (there is no other reason for it to exist, or for it to have
patterns or aesthetic qualities, or for it to use symbols or have cultural codes).
This leads us to three essential issues.
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Meaning is 'social', that is, language and conventions work only as shared meaning, and our way of
viewing the world can exist only as shared or sharable. When we read a text, we are participating in
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social, or cultural, meaning. Response is not merely an individual thing, but is part of culture and
history.
Meaning is contextual; change the context, you often change the meaning.
Texts constructed as literature, or 'art', have their own codes and practices, and the more we know of
them, the more we can 'decode' the text, that is, understand it - consequently, there is in regard to the
question of meaning the matter of reader competency, as it is called, the experience and knowledge of
decoding literary texts.
Reader response theory takes on New Criticism “affective fallacy” as a cause. In 1938, Louise
Rosenblatt published Literature as Exploration where she began to address the “transactional approach”. In
The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978), Rosenblatt thought reader and text must work together to produce
meaning. The poem is the transaction between the reader and the text. It becomes an event that takes
place during the reading process (the aesthetic transaction). Each time a reader interacts with a text, a
poem is created, no matter how many times the text has been read. She believes that a text allows for
many interpretations of the text, but it also limits the valid meanings: "several different yet probable
meanings" "It is from the literacy experience. . . that meaning evolves.", so that meaning is context
dependent, intricately associated with reading process.
What is then the reading process?
Methodology: Three approaches
Structuralism meaning, ultimately, does not reside in the text; approach textual analysis as if it were a
science; Barthes, Genette, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Prince, Culler--look for codes within the text, codes that
are a part of a system that allows meaning to occur in all facets of society, more interested in that overall
system of a given society, push both text and reader to background and highlight a linguistic theory of
communication and interpretation Gerald Prince: focuses on discourse, the actual presentation of events,
as important as story, the sequence of events, for they may or may not be actual to the reader. For Roland
Barthes the text is not linear, but multi-dimensional with several writings within it.
Phenomenology emphasizes the perceiver objects can have meaning only if an active consciousness
absorbs or notes their existence:Poulet, Iser, Jauss, Rosenblatt: "true poem can exist only in the reader's
consciousness, not on the printed page" reader's imagination must work Also, they believe that these
images or objects can be seen as going through an author's whole work (oeuvre)
Reader –response. Holds that the psychological, subjective, reader's thoughts, beliefs and experiences
play greater part in shaping work's meaning than the text. Its exponents, like Holland, Bleich believe that we
shape and find our self-identities in reading process, merge our dreams and fantasies with elements in text,
producing an interpretation acceptable to the members of a particular culture. For Mailloux reader-response
is a two-part theory for it gives the reader a task so that reader's response is the answer to that task.
Mailloux's categorizes some of the early types and theorists in reader’s response:
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Subjectivism: David Bleich’s three part model: original reading "symbolization", attempt to articulate
"resymbolization", and sharing or "negotiation". Psychological: Norman Holland: reader's identity
produces text’s meaning; thus, disagreements in interpretation come from different reader's identity:
"Identity is the unity I find in a self if I look at it as though it were a text"
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Intersubjective Model: Wofgang Iser the reader as creative "gap-filler" but he is far from Rosenblatt in
that he sees features of text as "pre-given" and which constrain the reader's creative activity; thus he
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can agree with Wimsatt and Beardsley in the 'affective fallacy" because he's not looking at results, but
only those things which are "at least potentially prestructured by the literary text itself" Stanley Fish
focused on a "text's manipulation of readers": "text's rhetoric creates a temporal pattern of responses
"; posited an "informed reader" who could do this Problem: don't take into account the individual reader
Usefulness: kept up the formalist approach of close reading, allowing criticism to continue
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Structuralism and the social model: Jonathan Culler challenged Fish, wanted a definition of "informed
reader" and set out to create a "literary competence definition, which included strategies such as
viewing a text in a specific genre, organizing meaning around central theme, relating metaphors to
each other; he argued against post-structuralists who confuse activities of describing "implicit rules"
with "changing rules," said conventions are in place, must be dealt with step by step, then there will be
a "geno-text, " the"text of infinite possibilities"; Noam Chomsky's "competent reader" Problem: who
decides on the standard of competence or the conventions
Mailloux explains that all these in 80s changed to something more like Rosenblatt's transactional view,
which had been accepted by composition teachers and educational specialists already. Mailloux posits
"rhetorical hermeneutics: an attempt to put aside the question of which reader or text determines
interpretation/ "change the subject of interpretive theory from talk about readers approximating texts to talk
about interpreters arguing over meanings. 'No way of theoretically describing the correct reader-text
relation in general." Mailloux sees advantage of this as creating a rhetoric history: how the interpretive act
works in a particular setting within a particular cultural politics, in a particular time; deconstruction,
feminism, marxism, New Historicism all play off this approach.
Kershner in Twentieth Century Novel: "A great deal of contemporary criticism is devoted to exploring
the way narratives, including both novels and films, construct a 'subject position' for the person reading or
viewing, influencing us to adopt particular political, ethical, aesthetic, and psychological postures while we
may be entirely ignorant of the subtle pressures exerted on us."
Matters to be brought to the text for use in the decoding of the text
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Accessibility of allusion, or Reference, that is access to historical references, to cultural allusions, to
literary allusions, and recognition of their relevance or meaningfulness in the text
Conventions of reading
conventions of significance (raising the meaning to its most general application), of metaphorical
coherence, and of thematic unity, which all help to create the meaningfulness of 'literature'
conventions as to the way in which texts 'represent' 'reality';
conventions of interpretation, of how texts are read -- e.g. formally, ideologically,
psychoanalytically, 'morally' , etc.
History of interpretation, that is knowledge of traditions of reading and of interpretation -- for instance,
the Hamlet which we read (have been taught to read) has been interpreted before us and for us.
Usage of genre, the knowledge of the characteristics and conventions of various genre, for instance
irony in satire; and knowledge of the typical topics of the genre, e.g. heroism, romantic love etc.;
historical knowledge of the same, i.e. what were the expectations of the various kinds of comedies held
by Shakespeare's contemporaries
attunement to polysemy, to the multi-valence of words, to connotative force, to metaphor and
metonymy and other rhetorical structures and devices; to historical uses of these
Knowledge of the extensional world: judging inference, probability; attributing causality; assigning truth
values
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The rhetorical, formal, linguistic, allusive strategies which guide -- or create, or evoke -- the readers'
responses, include:
the personal world, the needs of persons
association and interconnection of culturally empowered images, ideas, situations;
innate (or socialized) desires (for freedom, happiness, connection and coherence, etc.)
explicit and implicit motives and norms -- reading for a course, reading to improve social status, reading for
entertainment or understanding, etc.
the sociology of reading: who reads and why, with what social expectations and delimitations -- e.g.
considerations of class, of social mobility and use, of relation of reading to social and political life; the
distinctions between 'high' and 'popular', 'good' and 'bad' literature
socio-political perspective:the social and political situation and perspective from which the text will be read
and from which the matter of the text will be viewed; references which the reader may apply to her or his
social or political milieu -- e.g. in novels of manners, satires against corrupt governments, etc.
the world(s) of discourse
the use of language as it structures our understanding of social and power relations; the language and
rhetoric of the text in relation to that of other arenas of social meaning and power; the (cultural) way in
which we have learned to speak of (which our culture enables and permits us to speak of) our various
experiences, ideas and desires; rhetorical structures; multi-valence; ambiguity.
ideology & world-view
plotting devices: the contextual loading of words, images, episodes and characters;genre markers;
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