ABSTRACT
The starting point for interpretation processes has to be the language of the text. The question, of course, is ‘Whose language? Whose words?’ The writer’s? The reader’s? Can we, as readers, ‘access’ a text-any text-if we are concerned only with the language of the writer? Can we ‘get’ to that language without using ‘our own’? Can we ‘get’ to the text without constructing it with our own intertextuality? When we talk about style and stylistic effects, whose are they? ‘Ours’ as readers, or ‘theirs’ as writers? Neither literary nor stylistic analysis (if indeed one can make that separation at all) is just a matter of discussing such effects of language in a text, but is, as Deirdre Burton and others have suggested, ‘a powerful method for understanding the ways in which all sorts of realities are constructed through language’ (Burton, 1982: 201). But what realities? Whose realities? The writers’ or the readers’? Or that of the worlds they variously belong to-including the academic? Statements made by the critic only gain significance when the forms of the text are related to textual functions in one or more of those (and other) contexts. Understanding and articulating that context, I would suggest, requires rather close attention to be paid to the reader’s intertextuality.
