ABSTRACT
A text, according to the definition that French semiotician Roland Barthes (73–81) has given the word, is not a literary work or a portion of it, but its conceptualization, that is to say, a reading. Roland Bar tiles’s concept of textuality is often illustrated by the following two metaphors. In the first, the reader is compared to a musician for whom interpretation is an activity, a personal rendition of an original score. Like the musician, the reader proposes a personal understanding of the meaningful aspects of a literary work. Because it is the perception of the reader which creates the text, its coherence is in the eyes of the reader and not in the intentionality of the author(s), narrator(s), or editor(s). The etymology of the word “text” leads us to the second metaphor used to explain the reading process. The Latin noun textus means not only text, passage of scripture, but also texture, tissue, structure, and context; the verb textere is translated “to construct,” “to compose,” “to weave.” Thus the text is often described as a fabric, a network, or a web. The reader’s interest is focused on the materiality of the literary work, the fabric of its narrativity, in other words the processes by which and through which stories are told and understood. The interlacing of narrative threads, the weaving and wavering of the plot, the matter in which a yarn is spun create a substratum of meaning that structures, supports, or undermines our understanding of the story. Insofar as it examines the systems of signs that allow literary communication to take place, textual criticism belongs to the semiotic enterprise. Understood as a semiotic exercise, textual criticism is a reading process that differs substantially in its practice and presuppositions from classical biblical textual approaches and from traditional notions of formal or textual criticism.
