Stuff About Books and Literature

What are you really reading? Image by  Pedro Ribeiro Simões How do you approach reading? Do you passively consume the words on the page or screen in front of you, or do you interact with the writing? Linguist Roland Barthes had something to say on our conception of written language. French Philosopher, Linguist and Semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was one of the leading structuralist thinkers of the 20th century. He built his concept of the transformation of our approach to literary works based on the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Julia Kristeva, and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). Barthes noticed back in the 1970s that a change was taking place in how we approach language and literary written works, pointing out that disciplines were breaking down their borders and beginning to interact. Barthes viewed this move as part of the development of thought on  linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis – and he pointed out that the adjustment ...

Palimpsests. What are you really reading? Image by Adam Jones How do you read texts? Are you sure your interpretation and understanding of what you are reading is only coming from the text in front of you or is some of the meaning being transferred from elsewhere? The idea of transtextuality suggests that it is. French literary critique Gerard Genette (1930) took the idea of Bakhtin and Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality - that texts are not the original product of one author- one step further; his work Palimpsests proposes and defines ‘transtextuality’ as a more comprehensive term that determines “all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts.” In other words, Genette’s theory of transtextuality describes the numerous ways a later text prompts readers to read or remember an earlier one. He puts forward five types of transtextual relations which I have described in my article for Decoded Science , " What is Transtextuality? Unde...