Text

In its proper usage, the term refers to any written document (script, novel, memo, etc.), but it has also a wider application and broadly refers to any meaning ful cultural form, such as film or billboard ads. Texts communicate messages, with arguments often angled to support the central point. Texts have audiences, notional or real, and they have contexts, which give meaning to their message. Without that context of assumptions and implied codes, the meaning is not clear. The literary critic Terry Eagleton provides examples to show that the seemingly clearest “texts” are really quite ambiguous: “Dogs must be carried on the escalators” (Can one not get on without one?) or “Refuse to be put in this basket.” This interpretative openness of texts that appear to be semantically “closed” shifts the emphasis away from the author to the reader, from words to how words are read. The title of an essay by Roland Barthes (1988) “From [Page 516]Work to Text” encapsulates the epistemological shift away from the work as the effect of authorial intention to the text as a linguistic event. Text thus changes from being a message from an author to a reader to a deper sonalized element within a discursive web of relations. Other French writers like Jacques Derrida and Julie Kristeva emphasize the ways in which every text holds other texts within it, thereby making every text inter textual. Emerging out of digital technology, hypertext partially realizes the philosophical vision of intertextuality in its networking of texts into a potentially endless “docuverse,” a term coined by the information technologist Ted Nelson. For more information, see Barthes (1988).