The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

Discourse is a polyvalent word, although this has probably been the cause of its
popularity; the term “has perhaps the widest range of possible significations of any term in
literary and cultural theory, and yet it is often the term within theoretical texts which is least
defined” (Mills 1997: 1). The term in an academic sense refers typically to some kind of
relationship, whether this is between people, linguistic forms or texts. One point of view is
that the term refers to what is “largely a matter of negotiation between writer (speaker) and
reader (hearer) in a contextualized social interaction” (Verdonk 2002: 18), a phrase easily re-
interpreted to a matter of negotiation between A (i.e. a text) and B (i.e. its reader). In the
light of modern re-interpretations of ancient literate culture, the term „reader‟ is used here to
refer to both someone reading a text, whether aloud or in silence, as well as a listener. The
situation is often the latter, and it is predominantly with the Latin etymon audio, „to hear‟, in
mind that this thesis approaches the topic. As such, studying the discourse between text and
audience implies for the purposes of this thesis an approach that seeks to understand the
relationship between a text and its audience, a relationship that can take place on a number of
levels.
How is „discourse‟ different from „interaction‟? This is a valid question because it
would be superfluous to add yet another layer to the vocabulary if it serves little or no
purpose: the necessity for Occam‟s razor should never be too far from any study such as this. 4
Discourse is a fitting term for two principal reasons. First, „interaction‟, as described by the
Oxford English Dictionary, is a “reciprocal action; action or influence of persons or things on
each other”. This cannot be the kind of relationship that concerns this study because there is
no reciprocity on behalf of the text: the text does not react to the audience, but rather vice
4 Thus Schmitz (2007: 4), “many of those who, in the 1980s or early 1990s, were climbing higher and
higher into the unknown realms of theory, have now safely returned to the firm ground of the literary
texts”.
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