Page 67 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
'There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments
scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interest-
ing than the text. The world is one of these books' (Santayana
1940: 56).
The leading thread of many influential approaches to reading is
the idea that a text has no autonomous existence apart from its
reader. It is up to the reader to fulfil or actualize the messages
which the text itself only contains in a virtual or potential state.
Without a reader prepared to interpret the text, the text would
remain pretty meaningless. At the same time, a reader's interpreta-
tions depend on her/his historical and cultural context: the avail-
able reading tools (i.e. dominant ways of understanding the world)
vary according to the circumstances in which the reading takes
place. This applies to all sorts of objects: from poems to commer-
cials, from news programmes to paintings, from historical docu-
ments to geographical maps, from the concert hall to the catwalk.
Developments in the theory of reading show how the meaning of
a text depends on the frame of reference which the reader brings
to bear upon it. In examining these developments, we should
always bear in mind that theories of reading do not constitute a
unified critical movement or school. Writers working in a broad
range of theoretical fields (e.g. Formalism, Structuralism, Post-
structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism) have variously contribu-
ted to ongoing debates about the reading process and the part it
plays in the construction of both individual and collective identi-
ties. What these writers show, despite their different disciplinary
affiliations, is an emphasis on reading as a dialogue, or transac-
tion, between texts and their readers and a related emphasis on
the reader's creative role. In several camps, this has led to a
radical questioning of the author's power.
'Author' derives from the Latin verb augere which means 'to
make grow' or 'to produce'. At the same time, it is associated with
notions of authority and authoritarian behaviour. The concept of
authorship, therefore, points simultaneously to liberating and
restrictive agencies. A momentous contribution to the authorship
debate has been made by Roland Barthes's essay 'The Death of
the Author'. According to Barthes (1915-80), Western culture has
assigned inordinate value to the figure of the author, by defining
him as a kind of 'Father' or 'God' exclusively responsible for the
creation of a work and wholly in control of its meaning. Barthes

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