The Role of the Reader

Abstract

Abstract A literary text, like any other text, is primarily the realization of a mode of discourse or a number of modes of discourse. That is to say, its basis can be found in ways of writing (styles, registers, genres) that precede it and are found more widely than in just the individual work. Whatever is created by the individual writer, it is not the whole being of the text, because nothing is possible without the pre-existing discourses: and they are rooted in social, economic, political, and ideological conditions which go far beyond the consciousness and control of the writing subject, ‘the author’. This is not a matter of linguistic ‘styles’ only; styles of discourse encode the systems of ideas of the cultures which produce them: they are ‘registers’. In effect, the author is constituted by the forms and the ideas of the discourses which (with their social conditions) s/he has experienced. Creativity is founded on the author’s critical consciousness of these resources of discourse, and the practical skill to deploy language to a defamiliarizing effect. Because the whole process of production and reception of texts is essentially historical, defamiliarization must be transient, regularly requiring a secondary application of critical consciousness: the consciousness of the linguistic critic.