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[A] text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and
entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation,
but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and
that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.
The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up
a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's
unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.
~ Roland Barthes ~
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... the goal of literary work (of literature as work) [which] is to
make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.
Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which
the literary institution maintains between the producer of the
text and its user, between its owner and its consumer, between
its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into
a kind of idleness-he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious:
instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the
magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with
no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text:
reading is nothing more than a referendum. Opposite the writerly
text, then, is its countervalue, its negative, reactive value:
what can be read, but not written: the readerly. We call any
readerly text a classic text.
~ Roland Barthes ~
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O'Donnell predicts that there will be a fight over control in
cyberspace and that the
burden
of the reader will be intensified...
"When you are at sea in a mass of information that challenges
you to think and judge for yourself, the salesman will certainly
be readily at hand to offer easy surcease. There will be a real
struggle for control of the life of the mind in cyberspace."
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