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present century "there are people who write as if there were nothing but texts" and makes a distinction between two kinds of textualism. The first is instantiated by those who disregard the intention of the author and look in the text for a principle of internal coherence and/or for a sufficient cause for certain very precise effects it has on a presumed ideal reader. The second is instantiated by those critics who consider every reading as a misreading (the "misreaders"). For them "the critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He makes the text refer to whatever is relevant to that purpose." In this sense their model "is not the curious collector of clever gadgets taking them apart to see what makes them work and carefully ignoring any extrinsic end they may have, but the psychoanalyst blithely interpreting a dream or a joke as a symptom of homicidal mania" (151).
Rorty thinks that both positions are a form of pragmatism (pragmatism being for him the refusal to think of truth as correspondence to realityand reality being, I assume, both the external referent of the text and the intention of its author) and suggests that the first type of theorist is a weak pragmatist because "he thinks that there really is a secret and that once it's discovered we shall have gotten the text right," so that for him "criticism is discovery rather than creation" (152). On the contrary, the strong pragmatist does not make any difference between finding and making. I agree with such a characterization, but with two qualifications.
First, in which sense does a weak pragmatist, when trying to find the secret of a text, aim at getting this text right? One has to decide whether by "getting the text right" one means a right semantic or a right critical interpretation. Those readers who, according to the Jamesian metaphor proposed by Iser (1976, ch. 1), look into a text in order to find in it "the figure in the carpet," a single unrevealed secret meaning, areI thinklooking for a sort of "concealed" semantic interpretation. But the critic looking for the "secret code" probably looks critically for the describable strategy that produces infinite ways to get a text semantically right. To analyze and describe the textual devices of Ulysses means to show how Joyce acted in order to create many alternative figures in his carpet, without deciding how many they can be and which of them are the best ones. Moreover, sinceas I shall discuss latereven a critical reading is always conjectural, there can be many ways of finding out and describing the ''secret code" that allows many ways of reading a text. Thus I do not think that the textualists of the first type are neces-

 
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