The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

Language (1966), pp. 29–52, and
references.
NZ
Text We should beware of regarding
the printed text of a literary work as ‘the
work itself’. Many interesting questions
arise when we consider the process of
recovering ‘the work’ from ‘the text’. In
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)
I. A. Richards attempted to describe the
process of reading and reacting to a text,
and his analysis is suggestive.
Descriptive linguistics has clarified
certain aspects of the decoding process,
as applied to written or spoken ‘text’. Two
important points arise for literary criticism.
First, an adequate understanding of
the language-system involves a recognition
of the important role played by stress,
speed, loudness, pitch and voice-quality
in meaning. All these features are more
or less effaced by transposition into the
written code, and much of the writer’s
work is to find means of replacing or reorganizing
them. Gerard Manley Hopkins
resorted to modifications of the written
system which are far from precious or
irrelevant. Second, knowledge of how
the members of a community learn the
meanings of words (through their use in
contexts of language and situation) leads
to a distinction between subjective and
intersubjective responses to the text.
Subjective responses rely on meanings
derived from the use of a word in special
circumstances unique to the individual,
while intersubjective responses rely on
uses which are widespread throughout the
community. Clearly there is nothing so
simple as a dichotomy: some contexts are
peculiar to a section of a community or to
a family. The possibility of communication,
however, in the community at large
depends on the widest type of intersubjective
response. And literary criticism,
Text 237
if it is not to be local or (at worst)
autobiographical, must appeal to that
wider system of meanings. It must also be
remembered that since the socio-linguistic
background against which we decode a
text constantly changes through time,
marks on paper and recorded sound give
only an illusion of total stability. But then,
as Gombrich shows in Art and Illusion
(1960), the same applies to the apparent
permanence of stone and pigment.
Attempts to restore the past can be partially
successful only and cannot govern
our overall response to the text.
In his influential essay ‘From work to
text’, Roland Barthes put forward seven
propositions to distinguish between traditional
understanding of the literary work
and a new emphasis on ‘the text’ which
has since come to inform all recent discussion
of the term: (1) ‘the work is concrete,
occupying a portion of book-space
(in a library, for example); the Text, on the
other hand, is a methodological field....
While the work is held in the hand, the
text is held in language’. The first is
displayed, the second demonstrated. ‘A
text can cut across a work, several works.’
(2) ‘The Text does not come to a stop with
(good) literature; it cannot be apprehended
as part of a hierarchy or even a
simple division of genres. What constitutes
the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely),
its subversive force with regard to
old classifications.... If the Text raises
problems of classification, that is because
it always implies an experience of
limits...the Text is that which goes to the
limit of the rules of enunciation.’
(3) ‘Whereas the Text is approached and
experienced in relation to the sign, the
work closes itself on a signified...
[the Text’s] field is that of the signifier’
the work is moderately symbolic, but the
text is radically symbolic. (4) ‘The Text is
plural.... The Text’s plurality does not