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In this sense every text is susceptible to being both semantically and critically interpreted, but only a few texts consciously foresee both kinds of response. Ordinary sentences (such as give me that bottle or the cat is on the mat uttered by a layman), only expect a semantic response. On the contrary, aesthetic texts or the sentence the cat is on the mat uttered by a linguist as an example of possible semantic ambiguity also foresee a critical interpreter. Likewise, when I say that every text designs its own Model Reader, I am in fact implying that many texts aim at producing two Model Readers, a first level, or a naive one, supposed to understand semantically what the text says, and a second level, or critical one, supposed to appreciate the way in which the text says so. A sentence such as they are flying planes foresees a naive reader who keeps wondering which meaning to chooseand who supposedly looks at the textual environment or at the circumstance of utterance in order to support the best choiceand a critical reader able univocally and formally to explain the syntactic reasons that make the sentence ambiguous. Similarly, a mystery tale displays an astute narrative strategy in order to produce a naive Model Reader eager to fall into the traps of the narrator (to feel fear or to suspect the innocent one) but usually wants to produce also a critical Model Reader able to enjoy, at a second reading, the brilliant narrative strategy by which the first-level, naive reader was designed. |
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One could say that, while the semantic reader is planned or instructed by the verbal strategy, the critical one is such on the grounds of a mere interpretive decisionnothing in the text appearing as an explicit appeal to a second-level reading. But it must be noticed that many artistic devices, for instance, stylistic violation of the norm, or defamiliarization, seem to work exactly as self-focusing appeals: the text is made in such a way as to attract the attention of a critical reader. Moreover, there arc texts that explicitly require a second-level reading. Take, for instance, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is narrated by a character who, at the end, will be discovered by Poirot to be the murderer. After his confession, the narrator informs the readers that, if they had paid due attention, they could have understood at which precise moment he committed his crime because in some reticent way he did say it. See also my analysis of Allais's ''Un drame bien parisien" (Eco 1979), where it is shown how much the text, while step by step deceiving naive readers, at the same time provides them with a lot of clues that could have prevented them from falling into the textual trap. Obviously these clues can be detected only in the course of a second reading. |
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Richard Rorty ("Idealism and Textualism," 1982) says that in the |
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