Introduction

Abstract

The concern of many critical theorists today reflects a movement away from the notion of the text and the writer as completed independent objects, towards the idea of reading as a process which creates the text. Philippe Sollers, quoted by one of the most acute critics of our time, Gérard Genette, aptly expresses this trend:

Today the fundamental question no longer concerns the writer and the work, but writing and reading, and consequently it is our task to define a new space in which these two phenomena might be understood as reciprocal and simultaneous, a curved space, a medium of exchanges and reversibility in which we would at last be on the same side as our language … Writing is linked to a space in which time would have turned as it were, in which there would no longer be anything but that circular, operational movement.¹

Thus, it is the actual process of the production of the text by the reader which changes our concept of what writing is, and an awareness of this must inevitably colour any serious critical enquiry.