ABSTRACT
To read a text we must decode what the text literally says but at the same time we must bring our knowledge to the text to determine what the text actually means (to us). The knowledge that we bring can be of history, of the everyday world, of geography, of zoology or botany, of literature, of science and so on – any kind of knowledge can in principle be relevant in making sense of a literary text. When we read Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick, the text (in a parody of the use of information sources) gives us some of the knowledge about whales and the whaling industry that we might need; but there might be other facts about nineteenth-century America that the text does not tell us and that would nevertheless be useful knowledge in making sense of the text. In 1851 Melville might have assumed that his reader would know enough about the Bible to recognize it as the origin of the first sentence of his first chapter, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Today many readers will need to consult an information source to tell them this – either the footnotes of a critical edition of the novel, or perhaps a concordance to the Bible. Information sources are searchable collections of fragments of knowledge. They can be useful for our reading when they help us decode the text (to find the meaning of a particular word, for example) but their primary importance is that they can help us bring contextualizing knowledge to the text, particularly when we are separated from texts by history or geography and hence have drifted away from the knowledge that might have been assumed for the original readers of those texts.
