Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

46 reframing latin america
books and readers read them, consciously or unconsciously, each is creating
the text through a discursive fi lter as well as contributing to changes in
discourse.
If authors cannot attach specifi c meaning to their texts, and readers can
do so only for themselves, how do we explain that different readers come
up with similar interpretations of the same text? Moreover, what if this interpretation
more or less corresponds to the author’s description of the text,
as discovered, say, in an interview with the author? A semiotician would
say, in that case, that authors and readers might belong to similar discursive
communities. It is quite conceivable that readers and authors who share
cultural contexts will share similar interpretations of texts. In other words,
they will be mutually affected by a similar array of discursive constructs.
A reader from an alternative discursive community, or one who has been
trained in interpreting discourse, might come along and see a radically different
meaning in the text.
Part of the fun of cultural studies comes from acknowledging that no
one is above discourse. Semiotic readings not only discern discourses out of
which a text emerges, they also strive to remain aware of the discourses that
drive their own readings. Yet, no matter how much any one of us is aware of
the presence of discourse, no one is omniscient or able to be aware of the infi
nite ways in which our interpretations are discursively constituted. Thus,
any reader who analyzes a text and shares that analysis in a public forum (a
conversation, a written publication, etc.) exposes himself or herself to the
same discursive reading that she or he performed on an original author (see
Graph 2.3). Edward Said, for example, and his critique of nineteenth-century
English literature had many critics, and those critics had critics.
Said analyzed nineteenth-century British authors and found them to be
operating under an Orientalist discourse. His readers came along and found
Said himself to have been affected by a whole range of discourses that colored
his reading of literature. According to one critique, he failed to take into account
British women writers, who seemingly operated under a different sort
of Orientalism. Critics of the critics of Said noted that such analyses tended
to reinforce the Oriental/Occidental dichotomy rather than challenge it,
as was Said’s original purpose. 2 So each successive reading reveals another
level of discursive construction anonymously infl uencing any given author
or critic, whose inputs in turn contribute to shifts in discourse.
Critical theorists insist that the semiotic model is not limited to literature
and politics but applies to everything in the world—material, ideological,
and otherwise (see Graph 2.4). But if we depict the hermeneutic model
graphically, nature becomes the author, the material world becomes the