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minacy. What I call open texts are, rather, reducing such as indeterminacy, whereas closed texts, even though aiming at eliciting a sort of 'obedient' cooperation, are in the last analysis randomly open to every pragmatic accident. |
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0.2.1. Producing the Model Readers |
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To organize a text, its author has to rely upon a series of codes that assign given contents to the expressions he uses. To make his text communicative, the author has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared by his possible reader. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible reader (hereafter Model Reader) supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them. |
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At the minimal level, every type of text explicitly selects a very general model of possible reader through the choice (i) of a specific linguistic code, (ii) of a certain literary style, and (iii) of specific specialization-indices (a text beginning with /According to the last developments of the TeSWeST . . ./ immediately excludes any reader who does not know the technical jargon of text semiotics). Other texts give explicit information about the sort of readers they presuppose (for example, children's books, not only by typographical signals, but also by direct appeals; in other cases a specific category of addressee is named: /Friends, Romans, Countrymen . . ./). Many texts make evident their Model Readers by implicitly presupposing a specific encyclopedic competence. For instance, the author of Waverley opens his story by clearly calling for a very specialized kind of reader, nourished on a whole chapter of inter-textual encyclopedia: |
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(1) What could my readers have expected from the chivalrous epithets of Howard, Mordaunt, Mortimer or Stanley, or from the softer and more sentimental sounds of Belmore, Belville, Belfield and Belgrave, but pages of inanity, similar to those which have been so christened for hall a century past? |
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But at the same time text (1) creates the competence of its Model Reader. After having read this passage, whoever approaches Waverley (even one century later and even if the book has been translated into another languagefrom the point of view of a different intertextual competence) is asked to assume that certain epithets are meaning «chivalry» and that there is a whole tradition of chivalric romances displaying certain deprecatory stylistic and narrative properties. |
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