|
|
|
|
|
|
tionor deconstructionof a text performed by its interpreterinsofar as such a function is implemented, encouraged, prescribed, or permitted by the textual linear manifestation. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The basic assumption underlying each of these theories is that the functioning of a text can be explained by taking into account not only its generative process but also (or, for the most radical theories, exclusively) the role performed by the addressee and the way in which the text foresees and directs this kind of interpretive cooperation. It must also be stressed that such an addressee-oriented approach concerns not only literary and artistic texts but also every sort of semiosic phenomenon, including everyday linguistic utterances, visual signals, and so on. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In other words, the addressee-oriented theories assume that the meaning of every message depends on the interpretive choices of its receptor: even the meaning of the most univocal message uttered in the course of the most normal communicative intercourse depends on the response of its addressee, and this response is in some way context-sensitive. Naturally such an allegedly open-ended nature of the message is more evident in those texts that have been conceived in order to magnify such a semiosic possibility, that is, by so-called artistic texts. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
During earlier decades only works of art (specifically those produced according to the criteria of a ''modernistic" tradition) were taken as texts able to intentionally display, provocatively, their open-ended nature. On the contrary, in the last decades such a nature has been theoretically rooted into the very nature of any kind of text. In other words, before such a change of paradigm, artistic texts were seen as the only cases in which a semiosic system, be it verbal or other, magnified the role of the addresseethe basic and normal function of any semiosic system being instead that of allowing an ideal condition of univocality, independent of the idiosyncrasies of the receptor. With the new paradigm semiotic theories have insisted on the fact thateven though in everyday life we are obliged to exchange many univocal messages, working (hardly) in order to reduce their ambiguitythe dialectis between sender, addressee and context is at the very core of semiosis. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This paper will, however, focus on the change of paradigm in literary theories. Facing the new paradigm, I shall take a "moderate" standpoint, arguing against some intemperance of so-called reader-response criticism. I shall claim that a theory of interpretationeven when it assumes that texts are open to multiple readingsmust also assume that it is possible to reach an agreement, if not about the meanings that a text encourages, at least about those that a text discourages. Since literary texts are today viewed as the most blatant case of unlimited semiosis, it |
|
|
|
|
|