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INTRODUCTION
THE ROLE OF THE READER
0.1. How to Produce Texts by Reading Them
0.1.1. The Text and its Interpreter
The very existence of texts that can not only be freely interpreted but also cooperatively generated by the addressee (the 'original' text constituting a flexible type of which many tokens can be legitimately realized) posits the problem of a rather peculiar strategy of communication based upon a flexible system of signification. "The Poetics of the Open Work" (1959) 1 was already haunted by the idea of unlimited semiosis that I later borrowed from Peirce and that constitutes the philosophical scaffolding of A Theory of Semiotics (1976) (hereafter Theory). But at the same time, "The Poetics of the Open Work" was presupposing a problem of pragmatics.2 An 'open' text cannot be described as a communicative strategy if the role of its addressee (the reader, in the case of verbal texts) has not been envisaged at the moment of its generation qua text. An open text is a paramount instance of a syntactic-semantico-pragmatic device whose foreseen interpretation is a part of its generative process.
When "The Poetics of the Open Work" appeared in 1965 in French as the first chapter of my book L'oeuvre ouverte,3 in a structuralistically oriented milieu, the idea of taking into account the role of the addressee looked like a disturbing intrusion, disquietingly jeopardizing the notion of a semiotic texture to be analyzed in itself and for the sake of itself. In 1967, discussing structuralism and literary criticism with an Italian interviewer, Claude Lévi-Strauss said that he could not accept the perspective of L'oeuvre ouverte because a work of art "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

 
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