Authors

“Authors are readers themselves” (Darnton, Reader, 11).

“The creative act is only an incomplete and abstract moment in the production of a work” (Sartre 36).

“The writer’s audience is always a fiction … The reader must also fictionalize the writer. (Ong, Reader, 143).

“[A Writer] addresses implicit readers and hears from explicit reviewers” (Darnton, Reader, 11).

Texts

“Whatever they may do, authors do not write books … Rather they write texts which become objects copied, handwritten, etched, printed, and today computerized.” (Chartier, Reader, 90-1).

“A book changes by the fact that it remains changeless while the world changes” (Chartier, Reader, 94).

The advent of cheap literature (Bibliothèque bleue) “was the single most powerful instrument of the acculturation to writing in Ancient Régime France” (Chartier, Reader, 93).

It is also to argue that the detection of sociocultural differentiations and the study of formal and material devices, far from excluding one another, are necessarily linked” (Chartier, Reader, 93).

“The error of realism has been to believe that the real reveals itself to contemplation, and that consequently one could draw an impartial picture of it. How could that be possible, since the very perception is partial, since by itself the naming is already a modification of the object?” (Sartre 55).

“[T]here is no text outside the material structure in which it is given to be read or heard. Thus, there is no comprehension of writing, whatever it may be, that does not depend in part upon the forms in which it comes to the reader” (Chartier, Reader, 91).

On Meaning

“Text has meaning only through its readers” (de Certeau, qutd by Chartier, Reader, 87).

“Meanings are not therefore inherent, but are constructed by successive interpretative acts by those who write, design, and print books, and by those who buy and read them.” (Intro BH 12)

“New readers make new texts, and their new meanings are a function of their new forms’ (McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 20) (qutd in Chartier, Reader, 89).

Reading

On silent reading: “[T]he reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal” (Manguel 42).

“[Early-modern] readers understood reading as a process of taking the essence from a book” (Colclough, Companion, 55).

Reading is a “concrete act in which the destiny of the text is fulfilled” (Ricoeur 124).

“[Reading] rarely leaves traces, is scattered into an infinity of singular acts, and, purposely frees itself from all the constraints seeking to subdue it (Chartier, Reader, 87).

The reader is free to interpret the text in any which way (s)he pleases: the writer merely “appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of the work” (37).

“[R]eading is a pact of generosity between author and reader. Each one trusts the other; each one counts on the other, demands of the other as much as he demands of himself. For this confidence is itself generosity” (Sartre 49).

“[I]t is the reader who reads the sense; it is the reader who grants or recognizes in an object, place or event a certain possible readability; it is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs, and then decipher it. We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function” (Manguel 7).

The reader “foresees the end of the sentence, the following sentence, the next page. He waits for them to confirm or disconfirm his foresights. The reading is composed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakenings, of hopes and deceptions. Readers are always ahead of the sentence they are reading in a merely probable future which partly collapses and partly comes together in proportion as they progress, which withdraws from one page to the next and forms the moving horizon of the literary object” (Sartre 35).

“The reader must invent [the texts] in a continual exceeding of the written thing. To be sure, the author guides him, but all he does is guide him. The landmarks he sets up are separated by the void. The reader must unite them; he must go beyond them. In short, reading is directed creation” (Sartre 39).

“Watch the reader of a novel plunge into the imaginary life his book shows him. His body no longer exists. He leans his forehead on his two hands. He exists, moves, acts, and suffers only in the mind. He is absorbed by what he is devouring; he cannot restrain himself, for a kind of demon drives him on. He wants the continuation and the end; he is prey to a kind of insanity; he takes sides, he is saddened, he is no longer himself, he is no more than a brain separated from its outer forces, that is, given up to its images, going through a sort of crisis of credulity” (Excerpt from Paul Valéry’s 1927 talk, entitled “Propos sur la poésie”).

Bibliography
Chartier, Roger. “Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader.” The Book History Reader. 87-98.
Colclough, Stephen. “Readers: Books and Biography.” The Companion to the History of the Book. 50-62.
Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of the Book?” The Book History Reader. 9-26.
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. 1996.Ong, Walter. “Orality and Literacy: Writing Restructures Consciousness.” The Book History Reader, 134-146.
Ricoeur, Paul. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy). 2007.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Why Write?” in What is Literature? Harper & Row. 1965.
Valéry, Paul. “Propos sur la poésie.” 1927. Web.