In reply to your request
>I see I have now written myself into a state of considerable uncertainty
>about the relationship between the univocal and dialogic functions. Can
>anyone come to my assistance?
I would suggest that the univocal/dialogic distinction is misleading and
leads to difficulties as you yourself express. It appears that the more we
grapple with understanding how we understand or make meaning leads us away
from the possiblity of the univocal dimension. I think Russ is correct when
he says "I don't think meaning lies anywhere. It's a verb. We make it,
over and over."
A more useful distinction might be along the lines of construing the
text-reader-author relationship as a communicative relationship which
allows a writer to entertain and pursue the goal of constructing a text so
that it will convey meanings adequately. When the reader participates in
that communicative relationship that is considerably different from
engaging with a text as a means of generating new meanings and "Dialogic"
certainly fits both of those both situations of reading.
The ongoing debate in literary studies regarding the role of an author's
intentions in constraining a reader's interpretation has some relevance to
this discussion. The argument has evolved from the position held at the
beginning of the twentieth century, that understanding an author's
intentions was strategically necessary for understanding the literary text
and was the ONLY means by which an interpretation could be VALIDATED. With
New Criticism literary studies focused EXCLUSIVELY on the properties of the
text with the goal of interpretation. Additional information pertaining to
the author or to the historical period and cultural mores was considered
irrelevant for literary reading. Within this theoretical framework, the
influence of the author in the interpretive process was greatly diminished.
In the 1960's the European structuralist movement set out to replace the
interpretive paradigm altogether. Their interest was not on the meaning or
value of a work but rather on the devices which enabled it to be realized
within a social context. Thus, the emphasis shifted to the social
construction of meaning in the production and reception of literary text.
As a result, the author was marginalized (well "dead" is the way Barthes
put it) in the establishment of meaning and the role of the reader greatly
expanded.
In summary, the author died, the reader responded and in a number of
instances I have heard it claimed extended to include the view that the
text writes itself.
This has contributed to some of the situation you describe-
>With the M.Ed. students I teach (all full-time educators), I have noticed
>that, when they are engaged in group discussion of a text, they too tend
>to emphasize the dialogic function rather than the univocal. And
>sometimes, I confess, it worries me that they don't seem to be too
>concerned about whether or not they have understood the author's meaning.
While the intentions of the empirical author may be irrelevant for a
reader's interpretation, there is currently a renewed discussion of the
role of author in literary reading which does not focus on recovering the
original intentions of the empirical author but rather on how readers
construe the intentionality underlying the production of the text (Eco;
Currie). It has also been suggested that when confronted with unfamiliar
or problematic situations which make understanding difficult, readers have
to resort to guessing about the assumptions and aims of the author in order
to understand what is going on (Livingston).
In my own research with literary academics, and writers the construction of
an explicit communicative context which includes models of the author, and
reader as well as the text, appears to be a characteristic of highly
skilled performance. The goal of these readers does not include trying to
recover the original intention of the author but rather includes
participating in a communicative system.
This view allows you to remain
>sympathetic to Russ's point that meaning is a
>process and that it is therefore problematic to talk about the
>author's meaning, as if it were a fixed thing that could be got from the
>text.
while as a writer continuing
> to construct a text so that
>it will "convey [my] meanings adequately"; I also hope that my reader
>will attempt to understand those meanings and respond to _them_ (rather
>than to quite different ones) when dialoguing with my text.>
barbara
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Barbara Graves Email:
CXCH who-is-at musica.mcgill.ca
Laboratory of Applied Cognitive Science Off: (514) 398-4256
Department of Educational Psychology Fax: (514) 398-6968
McGill University