The excerpt of the Rabinowitz Book, Before Reading, clearly illustrates a point that I have seen argued about before many, many times: does meaning come from the readers, the author (as a reader), or the text? This has been written about since the existence of literary criticism, I’m sure, though most of the things I’ve read regarding it are from the mid-20^th century onward, and very clearly fall on the side of the readers in terms of creators of meaning. Rabinowitz uses the term “readerly idealism” to describe meaning as assigned by readers to texts, rather than provided by texts to readers. What he does that I hadn’t seen before is essentially propose a compromise with his swing set assembly metaphor. The author has a swing set in mind an provides the readers with the pieces to assemble it. He assumes the conventions of construction are well-known (maybe he provides an obscure one or two directly) by the readers, and then steps back, whether he wants to or not, to let the readers do their work. They may end up with a swing set that is nearly the same as the author’s, or they may end up with one that is a bit different, but that they built using the same pieces and similar conventions.

This approach strikes a balance between older notions of the text as a sort of godlike authorial surrogate and newer notions of authorial absence and textual malleability. We cannot reasonably say that every single person, given the same set of tools, will read the same text the same way because, well, they don’t, and they won’t. And where are we getting the exact “correct” meaning from? Dead authors cannot provide it, and living authors refuse to, or purposefully provide varying meanings, obfuscate it, or lie about it all the time. But we also cannot rely solely on readers for the aforementioned reason: they provide different readings of the same text using similar tools. If they are the ultimate authority, then the logical conclusion is that all texts are essentially meaningless; the meaning is entirely external.

The swing set just says that all of these things are important. What the text says, what the author meant it to say and wants it to say, what the readers see in it, etc. The danger now is only that someone without the proper conventions (tools, to keep the metaphor going) will be simply incapable of building anything from the pieces, or will build something so alien to a swing set that it cannot be reconciled with other readers, the author, and the parts in the text. It seems a bit democratic (e.g. if fifty people say it’s a swing set, the author says it’s supposed to be a swing set, and one other person says it’s a swimming pool, then that last person is doing something wrong), but it’s a much more refreshing and balanced way of looking at how people read and how meaning is derived from reading.

This actually reminds me of the discussion we had in class about the book How to Read Like a Professor, a book that claims to provide “rules” for teaching people to read “properly”. It may be inaccurate or simplistic (I’ve not read it, so I honestly don’t know), but trying to provide as many people as possible with the basic tools of reading so that they can all make a reasonable fascimile of playground equipment out of the swing set text is, I think, one of the major facets of teaching reading. A teacher would provide context in the set of a manual or instructions where the author would provide the pieces, and then the reader provides the elbow grease to get it all assembled.