THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY: WHAT READING REQUIRES
The second consequence of dealing with the sentential nature of written
texts may be considered. If written texts have the properties of quoted
expressions, new means have to be found for expressing the illocutionary
force that was lost in quotation. In reanimating quoted expressions one
must find new ways of recapturing illocutionary force through an elabor-
ate set of speech act verbs such asstate, claim, assert, imply, acknowledge,
allege, and the like. Note that such a characterization signals both how the
author may have intended his utterance to be taken (as a suggestion or
command, for example) but also how the reporter characterizes that
illocutionary force.Allege, for example, signals both: that the original
speaker believed what he said whereas the reporter has serious reserva-
tions. The language of speech acts is a fundamental part of the language of
subjectivity and mastering that language is one of the major ways that
writing and literacy affects cognition. In large part rationality involves
knowing how to take, that is, characterize, utterances—assuggestions,as
claims,asconclusions, and the like (see also Reilly, Baruch, and Berman
2002). The cognitive implications of literacy, in part, come from attempts
to make up for what has been lost in the transcription of utterances
(Olson 1994, chapter 5).
THE EVOLUTION OF WAYS OF READING
In order to understand ancient literacy, it is necessary to examine not only
who read and wrote but also how they cited, interpreted, commented on,
and criticized existing texts. Did they distinguish what texts meant from
what their authors meant by them? What was their conception of mean-
ing? The common or default assumption about reading is that the mean-
ing is ‘‘always already’’ in the text prior to and independent of anything a
reader brings to a text. But was this assumption held in classical times?
How did it arise? And when and why did it change? Even when the theory
of meaning was elaborated by Origen, an early Church father—the four-
fold meaning of Scripture—those meanings were regarded as given by or
intrinsic to the text (Smalley 1941, p. 5). Reader response theorists of our
generation are rather extravagant in their denunciations of this ‘‘given-
ness’’ assumption but remain vague on what kinds of constraints a text
puts on its correct or authorized readings and the traditions in which these
constraints are invented and taught to new readers.
There are many ways of reading, but classifying those ways and tracing
their development remains a task for the future. For some people read
aloud, some silently; some read to a group, some with a group; some read
to memorize the wording, some to extract the meaning; some read on the
lines, some between the lines; some read in public, some in private; some
Why Literacy Matters, Then and Now 399