Text versus Works

Theoretical Perspectives: Intersection of Text and the Reader

Theory—to be a statement or set of statements that set to explain a certain set of widely accepted phenomena or facts (pg. 67).

Theories or the reading process can be top-down, bottom-up, interactive, transactional, and affective models. As all readers have their own needs the more theories one know as a teacher the better one can help their students in the meaning making process.

 

  

Chapter 3: What is Text? A twenty –first Century Definition by Mary Katherine Kallus

Deictic—describes a word whose meaning changes with the discourse and/or context in which it is written or stated, that is then, now presently (pg. 72 Kallus, (2011)

1.     text  

/tekst/

Noun A book or other written or printed work, regarded in terms of its content rather than its physical form.

Verb Send a text message to (someone).

Synonyms theme - topic - subject

Free Association—Text:

Cell phone messages

Text book

communications

Book

An avenue to convey meaning

An interconnected body of work related to the same theme

A work of art

Something to be interpreted

Hartman describes it as more that just a written material—it can include visual texts such as a dance, art, theatre, movies, and television shows. It can be linguistic or non-linguistic (I suppose the dance or painting would be applicable here?) TEXT—ANYTHING THAT HAS MEANING (included in this definition is Bakhtin, Berger, Harman, Hartman and Hartman, Saussure).

Literacy is deictic because technology is also deictic

Text is derived from the Latin textus meaning “woven” or “to weave.”

Many theorist (Bahktin, Barhes, Hartman, Kristeva) describe a text as something that is woven; with wax and wane; a woof and a tweeter.  

Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) defines text as “[t]he text is the unmediated reality (reality of thought and experience)….as any coherent complex of sighs.”  He also describes that the life of a text “develops on the boundary between two consciousnesses, two subjects.” ‘“The ready-made [text] and the reactive text being created—and, consequently, the meeting of two subjects and two authors” –ocurrs.’ “The text is a type of juxtaposition’ a reflection of a reflection.’”(p. 73) 

 

 

Relates the content of text to more content of text

J. Kristeva –“a mosaic of quotations”

Barth has many approaches to what a text (what is a methodological field and how does it relate to text?) The work  is the symbols on the page and the text is the interaction between people and the text and the meaning made and discussed?  Have to produce meaning to have a text. If text is a noun then to be text one has to produce meaning which is a verb.

Approach 2—is a redefinition of text meaning cannot  be constrained through classifications?

Approach 3—the text is metonymic or open to interpretation  while the work is finite and closed

Approach 4—the text is plural as in that they are interrelated and reference each other.

Barth believes that there is collaboration or interaction between the reader and the text

It becomes a text through the interaction of the reader and the work (a work has only one interpretation while a text has many because it is the reader who interprets it through the lens of the reader.)

THE TEXT HAS BECOME A SOCIAL SPACE 

 

Louise Rosenblatt –studied the transaction that occurs between the reader and the text. She defines text as “…a set of black marks on ordered pages or [expanding it to speech, where there is] …a set of sounds reverberating in the air, waiting for some reader of listener to interpret them as verbal symbols and under their guidance, to make a work of art, the poem or novel or play.”  

Although she makes the same point as Brath she does so differently. She thinks that the text is the work and that it is just symbols on a page or speech, but it is the reader who transacts with it to create meaning.

Gee—states (and inferred here is that a text is symbols on a page or something that must be interpreted) that there must be a conversation with the text, either in one’s head or out loud to make meaning. Gee believes there are two texts the original and then there is the text in our own words which is what gives the text meaning.

Hartman defines text as “a flexible unit of meaning.” But text is not just the interpretation it is the act of interpreting as it is interpreted through the reader and their life.

Text is more that what is written on a page; text is anything from which meaning can be created, whether it is linguistic or nonlinguistic in nature.” Because text stands is interpretive it cannot stand alone. 

 

(Aside and Summary) The chapter would have been less difficult if the idea of reading for “the one or the True” interpretation had been explicitly stated at the beginning of the piece. Work is what the physical object while text is what is done with work as it becomes interpreted. Text is interactive by its very nature and without the interactivity or interpretation it is not text. 

 

 

Work  /  Text