ABSTRACT
I believe that this is an important question because in spite of the apparently increasing concern for the social contexts of knowledge and discourse in contemporary philosophy as well as literary theory, we have not as yet developed a fruitful way of speaking about the involvement of texts in the lives of communities. With a degree of schematization, most of the attempts that have so far been made in this direction can be seen as falling into one of two categories: either a text is relegated to a social realm called "ideology" and the critic exposes its ideological nature by analyzing it "scientifically;" or the text is alleged to be what a community of readers or interpreters makes of it, and the critic goes on with the usual business of making something of it, saving talk about communities for meta-critical discourse. In the first case more energy goes into trying to establish the scientific status of the analysis than doing the actual analysis, and in the second case the assertion of the communal character of literature does not amount to much more than a theoretical safeguard against the anarchy of pure subjectivism.
