Page 68 - Critical and Cultural Theory

READING
challenges this tradition of thought by giving unprecedented
prominence to the text's reader, and by maintaining that the text's
meaning is an effect of its reader's interpretation rather than a
product of its author's intentions. Interpretation, moreover, is
never definitive, for texts do not provide monolithic messages but
rather vast galaxies of signs to be pursued in many directions. 'We
know now', Barthes states, 'that a text is not a line of words
releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the
Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of
culture. ... a text is made of multiple writings ... but there is one
place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the
reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author' (Barthes 1977: 142-
4). Michel Foucault's essay 'What is an Author?' has also been
influential in challenging conventional approaches to authorship.
Foucault (1926-84) historicizes authorship by arguing that the
author is not an individual but rather a concept defined by specific
cultural, ideological and historical circumstances. Foucault
proposes the phrase author-function as more appropriate than the
word author. This phrase does not denote a specific person but
rather a body of works, theories and values associated with a
particularly prestigious name (e.g. Freud or Marx): 'such a name
permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define
them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others'
(Foucault 1988: 201). Critiques of authorship such as the ones
initiated by Barthes and Foucault have served to explode the myth
of the author as an exceptional being whose genius is supposed to
transcend space and time.
The reassessment of traditional attitudes to authorship has led
to major redefinitions of the reader's own role. A reader is not
constrained by the formulae and devices adopted by an author in
the construction of a text. According to some critics, a text -
though open to an incalculable number of interpretations - is
nonetheless in a position to guide the reader by means of self-
interpretation. That is, a text may give the reader clues and tips
suggesting how it could or should be read. Ultimately, however,
nothing can contain the text except, perhaps, the grammatical
conventions imposed by the language in which it is written. Even
this limiting framework loosens up when a text gets translated into

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