When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.
We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time. For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
But whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .
I argue that the Talmud is about the constant struggle to understand.
A change of style is a change of meaning.
Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.
We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.
Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.
There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.
Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.
You sit there, and you argue and you argue, and you sort of bully the hell out of the text until you're quite sure what it's revealing, and then you perform it.
The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.
I did my doctoral dissertation on the lectionary readings that we use at mass and how you have biblical texts that have been taken out of their original Bible context and put together for mass, and now they form a new text. Out of that new text, there is an interplay of new meaning.
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
