2002

If one attempts to understand the symbol-system that underlies any particular piece of literature, one cannot confine oneself to a single text or author. Every text speaks from and gives expression to an intellectual world, whose meanings far surpass the intentions of the individual or even the reflection of that world offered by any particular culture or historical context. Understanding texts as responses to a world of possible meaning introduces a larger question of literary goals, which lie beyond the question of the authorial intentions implicit in the surface of the text. The nexus between literary expression and historical context is often misrepresented in exegesis at the level of authorial intention, rendering an implicit distortion of a text by their assumed agenda: understanding a text reductively, as written with, for example, a specific political orientation and Purpose. Of course, texts do have such author-implicit purposes, and the accurate identification of such purpose always helps in the reading of a text's surface. Nevertheless, such exegesis inadequately exposes a text's signification for any who are not already intimates of its intellectual world. For all of us who are not, it gives a false security to our necessarily anachronistic reading of the text, as if the author could share in the literary functions of our genres. Central to my purpose is exposing the agenda of the literary world implicit in our texts.