Abstract

My PhD is entitled Sub-Versions of Reading. The thesis is concerned with critical refractions such as reading, interpretation, criticism, commentary... activities which resemble each other in that they do not resemble that from which they derive; thus derived rather than original, secondary rather than primary, their status is also deemed second-rate. My aim has been both to reread their inferior plight and rewrite this plight through the theoretical insights culled from recent literary theory. I therefore compare two theoretical frameworks, one hermeneutic, the other post-structural both of which have contributed, each in different ways, towards a theorization of reading. Following this, I come to argue that the kind of Unitarian, totalizing hermeneutic approach, which seeks to reduce the original text's polysemantic possibilities, unlike a post-structuralist strategy which renders the "original” indeterminable and unleashes the isotropisms of textuality, can make no real critical difference to empower the refractor, be it the reader, critic or translator. Thus my argument finally uses translation, as the very site, that 'impossible place' where the multiple discourses on reading, re-reading, misreading, <un)readabl1ty, reading/as/writing connect, and where the version of translation can be theorized differently. Here, theories can be seen to multiply, and in multiplying, they not merely transform the "state" of translation but also the state of "theory".