Class Post

In Thursday’s class discussion we talked about Macherey’s idea of intertextuality; that all texts are drawn from other texts. By this we do not necessarily mean text in the literal sense, but in terms of anything that could shape the way an author creates their work such as a past experience or previously learned knowledge that then could be incorporated. It is impossible to create something that is truly original and has not drawn from any other sources. Even though this idea seems very obvious once discussing it in class, I had never thought about anything I had read in this way, because at the time it may have seemed very original. Now when reading texts, the word original has taken on new meaning.

Another concept that we discussed in class was perversion, the idea that text must be turned inside out in order to fill in the gaps. We talked about the idea that we need to understand that text is not a unified whole and we as readers need to bring something to it in order to unify it. To me, this is very reminiscent of the feeling of being in a classroom and, and many of the class discussions I have been a part of in high school and college. After reading whatever the assigned reading was, we go around the room and try to dissect the authors meaning. Everyone in the classroom is encouraged to participate and step out of the box in order to stir up multiple perspectives of the reading. This process is exactly what must occur, according to Macherey, to read between the lines. And in this case, I think that a group setting is a very productive means to doing so, since you are able to see others interpretation of “the gap”.