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is an object endowed with precise properties, that must be analytically isolated, and this work can be entirely defined on the grounds of such properties. When Jakobson and myself tried to make a structural analysis of a Baudelaire sonnet, we did not approach it as an "open work" in which we could find everything that has been filled in by the following epochs; we approached it as an object which, once created, had the stiffnessso to speakof a crystal; we confined ourselves to bring into evidence these properties. (Caruso 1967:8182) |
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I have already discussed this opinion in the introductory chapter of The Role of the Reader, making clear that, by stressing the role of the interpreter, I was not assuming that in an "open work" one can find that "everything" has been filled in by its different empirical readers, irrespective of or despite the properties of the textual objects. I was, on the contrary, assuming that an artistic text contained, among its major analyzable properties, certain structural devices that encourage and elicit interpretive choices. However, I am quoting that old discussion in order to show how daring it was during the 1960s to introduce the "act of reading" into the description and evaluation of the text to be read. |
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In Opera aperta, even though stressing the role of the interpreter ready to risk an ideal insomnia in order to pursue infinite interpretations, I was insisting that to interpret a text means to interpret that text, not one's own personal drives. Depending as I was on the aesthetics of interpretation of Luigi Pareyson, I was still speaking of a dialectics between fidelity and freedom. I am stressing this point because, if during the "structural sixties" my addressee-oriented position (neither so provocative nor so unbearably original) appeared so "radical," today it would sound pretty conservative, at least from the point of view of the most radical reader-response theories.
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2. A Web of Critical Options |
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The opposition between a generative approach (according to which the theory isolates the rules for the production of a textual object that can be understood independently of its effects) and an interpretive approach is not homogeneous with triangular contrast, widely discussed in the course of a secular critical debate, among interpretation as research of the intentio auctoris, interpretation as the research of the intentio operis, and interpretation as imposition of the intentio lectoris. |
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The classical debate aimed at finding in a text either (a) what its author intended to say or (b) what the text says independently of the intentions of its author. Only after accepting the second horn of the |
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