1. introduction into the theory of the text

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Course 1

Introduction into the Theory of the Text

The word textere coming from the Latin to weave has been associated by modern criticism with theterm structure, placed at the core of the structuralist method. Traditionally, the text is referred to in point of itsgenesis, exterior elements which influenced its production, biographical elements pertaining to its authors life,social, political, historical elements, etc. Formally interpreted exclusively as any instance of written work, the texthas come to acquire a much larger scope. It ceased to be linked to the written/verbal code and was also associatedwith other forms of non verbal codes. Gradually, in modern criticism, anything can be considered a text andinterpreted.

Throughout literary history there were different opinions on the degree of intertextuality existing in everytext depending on the importance given to such concepts as inspiration, originality, imitation,translation; for example, the Neo-Classical period showed an obvious respect for classical writers who offeredan inexhaustible source of inspiration, providing thematic and formal resources for imitation. Even ifRomanticism placed a special emphasis on originality and spontaneity trying to break with the past, it still gotsome of its inspiration from mediaeval literature and the classic precursors redefining the whole concept of

originality. This debate over imitation/originality is extended up to modernism and post-modernism whereallusion and parody become defining principles, while re-writings and re-interpretations of classic texts aregradually turned into recurrent elements of composition. Heidegger is the one who makes an extended analysis ofthe work of art seen as allegory and symbol and questions both originality and difference. Each writer creates his

precursors - Borges used to say challenging the doxa of writing as territorialism and demarcation of property,borrowing in order to subvert the concepts of authorial integrity and textual fixity (Borges in Worton & Still, p.13).

Traditional critics speak about the thematic, symbolic, ideological, stylistic, lexical, metrical, etc. levelswhich have to be related when analysing a text. In order to be analysed, a text should be deconstructed intosmaller units (narrative units). Todorov speaks about three levels of interpretation: verbal, syntactic (seen as acomplex combination of spatial/temporal/logical units) and semantic. Nowadays it is usually referred to as havinga surface structure (where the interaction of all these levels is placed) and a profound structure (the macro-

structure) which is responsible for textual coherence.Other traditional critics speak about the thematic, symbolic, ideological, stylistic, lexical, metrical, etc. Levels

which have to be related when analysing a text. Nowadays it is usually referred to as having a surface structure (where theinteraction of all these levels is placed) and a profound structure (the macro-structure) which is responsible with thetextual coherence.

RELATIONS TO REST OFTHE WORLD

(everything else the text refers or relates to)Texts are ABOUT things

TEXT AS PRODUCT/S(versions of the text as notes, drafts, publications, etc)

Texts ARE things

PRODUCER/S RECEIVERS(author, artist, performer, etc.) (readers, viewers, audiences, etc.)

Texts are MADE Texts are RESPONDED TO

CONTEXT(everything the text refers

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or relates to as historical, TRADITIONpolitical, social circumstances) (other texts used in its production)

TEXT

PRODUCER RECEIVER(author, artist, performer etc) (readers, viewers, audiences etc)

Text - profound layer: where writing becomes the representation of the exterior reality- intermediary level: intertextuality where the material of the text works with, which encourages

the narrative function.- superficial level: words, rhymes, etc. (Philippe Sollers)

The text is understood as an array of achieved products or as a series of constitutive processes.It is related to its producers, when text is taken as the expression of the design of particular authors, artists,directors, etc. All producers, including publishers, performers are somehow reproducers as re-reading , translatingalways imply interpreting. Another element of the link is the receiver, when the text is taken through its effects onreaders, audience, viewers. The receivers are referred to in terms of re-producers.

The text can be related to representational, referential, relevance-based dimensions. A text exist in timeand space for each of its constituent processes takes place at a variety of historical moments; it represents a

plurality since it is based on a series of notes, drafts, sketches, editions, etc. It is usually limited to written/printedtexts, emphasising the achieved product rather than the process. The reception theory interested in the receptionaesthetics agrees on the fact that a text does not simply exist in itself but that it exists as part of a shifting relationwith readers over time. Texts, in their opinion, as in the tenants of the New Criticism, are a constantly re-forming

construct.Hans Robert Jauss sees the text historically, with a changing horizon of expectation defined by

the meeting of the historical moments of the text and the reader. The relation between text and reader constantlychanges according to time and space. There is no fixed point of reference but a succession of moments ofreception, each one affected by the expectations, tastes and aims of the receivers.

Wolfang Iser is preoccupied with the relation between text and readers that share the same culturalframe. He establishes the following terms:

- implied reader : the reader apparently intended by the author and implied by the text as a part whichactual readers are invited to fill - eg. L. Sterne and his dialogue with an implied reader

- blanks and vacancies : areas of openness and indeterminacy in the text which actual readers fill accordingto their own orientations (gaps and silences) eg. Sterne and the unreliable narrator

- affirmative negation: the dialectal activity of meeting such blanks, vacancies creatively as well as

critically. There are different responses for different types of readers (psychoanalytical, feminist, Marxist,postcolonial readings).Roland Barthes, one of the most famous representatives of structuralism makes a distinction between

legible texts (which offer the pleasure of immersion in a fictional world) and writable texts (which offer the joy ofparticipating in the construction of a fictional world).He also distinguishes between close and open texts. Theworks of art are considered to be finite and close while a regular text contains holes and gapes which relate to itstexture/tissue.

Mikhail Bakhtin thinks that any text (word, discourse) refers backwards to past utterances to which itgives a response and forwards to future one to which it anticipates the responses. All this is linked to the responseactivity of a text. In the deconstructivist field, Jacque Derrida insists that both writers and readers, since they usethe same language code are involved in the same process of displacing and differing meanings. The permanent

play within and between words and texts shows that there is no stable point of departure/arrival in the process of

writing-reading and no fixed delimitation between writer and reader.The manner in which a text is received and interpreted by its readers belongs to the theory ofreception; this one includes:

- a passive/submissive reading: accepting the values and the versions of the reality the text offers- an oppositional/counter-reading: the attempt of subverting the meaning

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- an alternative or negotiated reading

[The text is] woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?)antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through its vast stereophony. The intertextual inwhich every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin ofthe text: to try to find the sources, the influences of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations

which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations withoutinverted commas. (Barthes,Image - Music - Text,)

A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue,parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader, not, aswas hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the cotations that make up a writing areinscribed without any of them being lost; a texts unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet thisdestination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply thatsomeone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted [] the birthof the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. (Barthes, Image - Music - Text,)

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the

Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash.The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. []The writers only power isto mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them []. Lifenever does more than imitate the book itself, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost,indefinitely deferred. (Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author)

Language can be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cutthe front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sounds fromthought nor thought from sound. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics)

For the writer of artistic prose the object reveals first of all precisely the socially heteroglot multiplicity of itsnames, definitions and value judgements. Instead of the virginal fullness and inexhaustibility of the object itself,

the prose writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object by socialconsciousness. Along with the internal contradictions inside the object itself, the prose writer witnesses as wellthe unfolding of social heteroglossia surrounding the object, the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goeson around any object; the dialectics of the object are interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it.(Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination)

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1. introduction into the theory of the text

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