CONCLUSION

Theories of reader-and audience-response claim that the meaning of a piece of writing depends on the community within which it is read or performed. Each interpretative community, as Stanley Fish has often pointed out, validates a particular reading, and, more provocatively, it is at least conceivable that the reverse is true and that no reading is a false one: every reading implicitly prescribes the interpretative community in which it makes sense. At such a level of abstraction, this theory remains studiously tautologous. It only denotes a practical concern when we ask if it is possible to belong to different interpretative communities at the same time. Historicism negotiates just such conflicts of interest and shows them to be the rule in interpretation and not just a hypothetical difficulty. In its most rigorous forms, it defines itself against a successful reconciliation of past and present, dividing itself as a result of dialogue with the past, revising the protocols by which it revealed that past and so refuting the idea that its interpretative community was ever self-identical. The

attempt to rescue Fish from triviality by saying that this is still an integrated community which has agreed on conventions for change is somewhat embarrassed by the unforeseeable quality of change – its changeability – in historicism’s stronger versions.