Writing restructures the speech act, for every text is addressed to every reader in every time, carries its own world of reference within itself, and has freed itself from the intentions of its author.... Its world is always created in the dialectic between itself and the reader.... Once written, a text assumes a an independent existence and acquires meanings of its own quite apart from those intended by its author.
Marbell pauses, and looks around the class.
"Steven Tyler...‘every reader in every time.’ Do you hear that? That’s the point here. That’s the theme.
Take T, for example. He’s writing a culturally contextualized novel - contextualized in the nearly pre-novelistic literary history of his country, contextualized in the socio-political milieu of that country at that time (movement and change, always movement and change - spurred by angry young men), contextualized even within the canon of his own work, which until then had been...picaresque? So a reader at that time comes at this novel differently than we do. But neither can we step into that time and place, nor can we hope to confine the novel to it. It exists. We exist. We can experience it on our own terms."
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