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contrast with other sorts of formalism, Intertextuality has presupposed that the text cannot exist as an hermetic or self-sufficient or closed system, since it permeated with references, quotations, allusions and other influences, and has set up a dialogue with them. (The writer is first a reader.) So, although Intertextuality was in essence a text-oriented critique, once external factors, social, political, religious, are seen to affect a text, which now included any signifying structure including the Book of Nature and even social codes, a much wider horizon is opened up. When it is further argued that the reader's experience of some practice or theory unknown to the author may lead to fresh interpretations, we move into the contiguous area of Text and Response.
The severance of the author from the text had meant that its meaning was no longer to be located in the unknowable intentions or unconscious drives of some writer. But is meaning so easily locatable in the possibly polysemous text itself? As if in response to such a dilemma, a strong connection was now discerned by various critics between the text and the reader. Indeed it was in this relationship or interaction that significant communication, indeed the very existence of the artistic work, the literary phenomenon, was to be somehow located.
Holland (1968), for example, had proposed that the appreciation of a literary work was an experience structured by the reader's unconscious as well as by the text itself. Riffaterre (1982) argued more generally that the literary phenomenon lies in the relation between the unchanging text and the reader, and not between text and author, or text and reality. "Formal analysis bears on the text . . . ; on the internal relationships among words; on forms rather than contents . . ."26
The rigid formalism of this latter position pointed to a need to re-examine both the external relations of the text and its readership. This emphasis on the audience, that is to say on reader-response, was most carefully articulated by Wolfgang Iser (1978), following in the steps of H.-G. Gadamer. For Iser the text consists in "an effect to be experienced" rather than "an object to be explored". This incidentally led to a rethinking of the literary history and critical evaluation of classical texts along the lines of the new Textrezeptionsgeschichte and -ästhetik outlined by H.R. Jauss (1982; 1990). Unfortunately, the whole notion of "readership" or "audience" continues to present problems. Are we to think of the reader as the passive receptor of the work or the active creator of meaning and value, or even as the mediator between the text and external reality, including political action.
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26 Riffaterre (1982) 2425; 90. Later he says of a poem: "it is based entirely on words arranged in advance, prefabricated groups, whose meaning has not to do with things, but rather with their role in a system of signifiers . . . Any interpretation tending to immobilize this mechanism by reducing the text to reality and to the static atomism of the dictionary fails to recognize the function of poetry as an experience of alienation. " (412)

 
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