> Having had no contact with academic linguistics before joining > mailing lists such as this one, I was bemused, amused, amazed by > the evidently fashionable view that the interpretation of a text > or the projection onto it of private fantasies by any jumped-up > Tom, Dick or Harriet is potentially as valid as that intended by > its author. No, no ... this is not what `we' - us unpopular postmodernists - have being saying at all (at least not me) I'm simply proposing that every text relates to every reader differently - as I said, everyone's Seymour is different, everyone's perception is shaped by a million different things. Thus, the text itself is enacted by all those things, including, and not discounting, the author him or herself who of course makes a contribution but whose contribution is in the end simply another view to add to the others. It's a little like the old fable of the five blind women who want to know what an elephant looks like - one finds the tale and thinks it's like a snake, one finds the leg and thinks it's like a tree, and so on. Only collectively do they create and enact the elephant. Yours with extreme impudence, Camille verona_beach@geocities.com @ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442 @ THE INVERTED FOREST www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest