Rebecca Moore Howard
Writing 205-283, Spring 2000

Definitions of "Text"

  • Text = "any instance of spoken or written language that could be considered in isolation as a self-sufficient entity" (5).1

  • "To see social institutions, social customs, social changes as in some sense 'readable' is to alter our whole sense of what such interpretation is. . . . ."2

  • Derrida: "'A text remains . . . forever imperceptible. Its law and is rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception'" (118).3

  • "The physical text has no function apart from the writer and reader who interact with it. Its purpose is determined by their purposes because . . . 'there are no texts, but only interpretations'" (62).4

  • "As George Dillon observes, a 'text is completed in the mind of a reader'" (57).5

  • "Meaning . . . arises from the 'multiple heterogeneous contexts' of a text. Historically situated and culturally embedded, meaning is constructed locally, 'within the occasions of the text's appearance.' Thus a single text is actually an intertextual network, 'a kind of junction where other texts, norms, and values meet and work upon each other" (10).6

  • "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing" (128-9). Critics like this approach, because it accords them status to be the discoverers of the Author and thus the discoverers of meaning (129). "We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. . . . .7

    • 1 Covino, William A., and David A. Jolliffe. "An Introduction to Rhetoric." Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 1-26.

    2 Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic, 1983. 30-1.

    3 Klein, Julie Thompson. "Text/Context: The Rhetoric of the Social Sciences." Writing the Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse. Ed. Richard Harvey Brown. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992. 9-30.

    4 Harris, Expressive Discourse.

    5 Harris, Expressive Discourse.

    6 Klein, Julie Thompson. "Text/Context: The Rhetoric of the Social Sciences." Writing the Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse. Ed. Richard Harvey Brown. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992. 9-30.

    7 Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image-Music-Text. Trans. and ed. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977. 142-8. Rpt. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Ed. SŽan Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995.