Where is a Text? A Neurological View

Abstract

Where is A text? The question lies at root of much thinking about literature, but most crucially, at core of reader-response thinking, and its difficulties with literary people. Reader-response criticism has trouble with literary people because literary people have trouble with reader-response criticism. Imagine for a moment familiar scene of a slightly bored academic audience being addressed by a reader-response critic, me, for instance. I assert that what you or I know of a text is only your or my conception of it. Ouch! Red alert! Grumbling ensues and indignant questions. Are you saying text does not exist? (Echoing notorious question of Stanley Fish's apprehensive student, there a text this class?) No, I said nothing at about existence or non-existence of text. (No, I am not Bishop Berkeley nor was I meant to be.) Saying a book is all your mind, is not saying book is not real?as real as anything else (as good Bishop would have said). Nor is it saying that you do not feel inspired or moved or pleased or annoyed by book. I try to shift ground. Let me put that another way, more accurately. 'What you know of a text is simply sum of your perceptions of it.' Is that better? Or, still more accurately, perhaps, 'You cannot know anything save through some human process of perception your brain (seeing it, hearing about it), unless your knowledge is innate or comes by divine revelation.' To me, that seems so obvious as almost to be tautological, and, to be sure, at this point, grumbles usually die down. But not discontent or disagreement with first statement. People will agree to these latter statements, but balk at idea that one cannot talk about the text, supposedly an independent thing out there, a world of not-me beyond our eyeballs, apart from our perception of it in here. They fulminate still more if I try to apply same reasoning to a movie on a screen or a play on a stage. Even for someone like me who has been thinking as a reader-response critic for years, it is hard to avoid traditional phrasings like these: