ABSTRACT
The survey of literary theory and of ethnographic approaches to literacy in Chapter 3 indicated the widespread acceptance of the proposition that different readers read the same text in different ways. Texts, likewise, are not considered as stable repositories of authorial meaning; they have become slippery shape-shifters, holding up a mirror not so much to nature as to the reader. Reading is semiotic activity, the construction of meaning motivated by the interests of the reader; reading is a process in which the whole subjectivity of the reader is implicated (Kress 2010; see also Chapter 2 of this volume). Each reading is thus necessarily gendered, racialised, historicised: the product of a specifi c historical subject, reading in a specifi c historical context.1
