Abstract
How do we read ? By " postextual ", as Franc Schuerewegen puts it, in other words, by questioning the authority of the text. Indeed, the text is very little. It is a series of instructions for making an object that begins to exist when the text is read, and that reading can modify and transform. Like a musical score, the text is a series of instructions that enable the work to be shared. But how do we know what a good interpretation is, and how do we distinguish it from a bad or less-than-good ?
For literary theorist Stanley Fish, literary reading is the application of a series of procedures that allow the text to exist. For Fish, the text is almost nothing. But there is an authoritative body that regulates reading : the interpretive community, whose constraints we have internalized. By highlighting the weight of this social instance, Fish shows that we can't be content with textual arguments to think about the question of good or bad reading.
Text is not always easy to grasp. The examples given by Raymond Picard, Roland Barthes' great enemy, illustrate this at : some of Molière's plays are close to the tragic, while Racine's are conversely comic. A text can be read in different ways, within the constraints imposed by the interpretative community.
