Briefly, and positively my last for the night, Erminia.
And apologies, there was too much in this post for me to digest, but I *had*
meant to pick-up on this earlier.
<<
If the user can be without the producer, in the sense that we are in Fish's
land of Is there a text in this class? then can the producer do without the
user?
>>
Well, there was Emily Dickinson who was virtually a producer without a user
for the largest part of the 1000-odd poems she wrote, during her life.
And to a lesser degree Blake.
And Thomas Traherne.
But it's hard being an artist as solitary as that, and my mind still boggles
at the way that Emily D. could carry-on a lifetime-poetic-project with no
audience.
Without going (linguistically) crazy.
Blake may have had an incredibly restricted audience while he was alive, but
it was still more than the Sainted Emily, and he *nevertheless* stopped
making consensual linguistic sense not long after +The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell+.
<<
Neo-hermeneutics apart, the reader cannot range too far away
from what the author has programmed, since the text is produced in a
culture which sets the standards and the meanings, which are therefore
shared within a limited range of variations.
>>
Yeah, and we're back to Emily Dickinson vs. Blake here. Blake seems at some
point to have given up bothering to play within the limits of any kind of
consensual interpretive mode. Whereas Emily D. made (consensual) sense to
the end.
Beyond admirable that, and suggests to me an artistic commitment so steely
it beggars belief.
Robin
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