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Canons, Culture Wars And History: A Case Study Of Canonicity Through The Lens Of The Blithedale Romance, Daniel L. Shiffner

Honors Papers

The act of reading a text is twofold. There not only needs to be a text present, but also a reader who understands and interprets that text. One can think of the act of reading as the creation of a second, interpretive text. This second text documents the reader's interpretations of the physical text at hand. While the primary text remains relatively stable throughout time, the second, interpretive text changes with every reading. While these readings are circumscribed to individual readers, the culture and historical situation that the readers exist within also influence him/her.

Michel Foucault proposed that one could …