The semantic fabric of the text, like the fabric of the universe, can be theorized as a space-time continuum alive with memory of probabilities, memory of alternatives, and memory of change (1060).
literary texts as diachronic objects: objects that extend across time, across a temporal gulf between language users (1060).
“historicism” as it is now practiced rests largely on semantic synchronism: the meaning of a text is assumed to be the property of the historical period in which it originated; coextensive with that period, it remains undisturbed by anything beyond (1060-61).
To “historicize” in this sense, then, is to impute meanings to a text by situating it among events in the same slice of time (1061).
This synchronic model hardly acknowledges that the hermeneutic horizon of the text might extend beyond the moment of composition (1061).
why should a text not be interpreted in relation to events outside its temporal vicinity? (1061).
The preposition in, capturing a literary text in its pastness, cannot say why this text might still matter in the present (1061).
Diachronic historicism suggests that human beings are finite, bringing short-lived meanings to long-lived words (1061).
resonance. . . . the traveling frequencies of literary texts: frequencies received and amplified across time, moving farther and farther from their points of origin, causing unexpected vibrations in unexpected places (1061).
Across time, every text is a casualty and a beneficiary (1061).
A theory of resonance inverts the Bloomian hypothesis, by linking literary endurance not to the persistent integrity of the text, but to its persistent unraveling, not to the text’s timeless strength but to something like its timeful unwieldiness (1062).
context [is] a diachronic relation: extending beyond the originating circumstances of a text and moving on to engage the circumstances that give birth to a semantic life at the moment of reading (1062).
resonance is a generative (and not merely interfering) process, one that remakes a text while unmaking it (1062).
I celebrate an enchantment primarily aural. I celebrate it as the work of time, the feat of motion that keeps a text vibrating (1062-63).
noise is beneficial . . . it enriches the dynamics for interpretation (1063).
stochastic resonance . . . a weak signal is boosted by background noise and becomes newly and complexly audible (1063).
noise is a necessary feature of a reader’s meaning-making process (1063).
Noise is the condition for the enduring resonance of texts (1063).
Endurance must come not from the superior insulation or airtight acoustics of an inviolate entity but from activation by noise, from ceaseless disturbance and subjection to the currents of change (1064).
the literary might refer to that which resonates for readers past, present, and future (1064).
a text can remain literary only by not being the same text (1064).
It endures by being read differently (1064).
Texts might be thought of, then, as nonintegral objects (1064).
A literary text is a prime example of an object that is not individuated as a fixed set of attributes within fixed coordinates (1064).
a text is the incomplete expression of a finite language user; moving beyond that finite individual, it becomes a collective potentiality, a force of incipience commensurate with the incipience of humanity (1064).
[system of roles? communal nature of legal interpretation, re: Cover]
a “kinematics” of the text . . . the text’s continuous movement through time (1064).
any effort to periodize absolutely, to put a text into a discrete slice of the past, must do violence to its continuous movement and meshing, a process thinkable only through a reciprocal description across time and only by recognizing the problem of agreement attending that reciprocity (1065).
a literary text is objectively unresolvable because its semantic universe, also a continuum, cannot be contained in a finite interpretive frame but keeps moving on, risking disagreement with other readers (1065).
context is not a fixture or a given, for since the world is a continuum, no object can stand by itself or be exhausted by the relations it entertains at a particular moment (1065).
A text is finite, but its contexts are countless (1065).
Literature, in short, is inseparable from the tonality imputed to it when it is received (1065).
the seen is now automatically equated with the known (1066).
The literary, it seems, comes into being not only through the implied reader but also through the reader not implied, not welcome (1067).
resonance is inseparable from dissonance, from the outbursts of sound produced when the reader clashes with the author, when their semantic universes fail to coincide (1067).
in foregrounding the agency of hearing and predicating it on the potential disagreement between author and reader, the Longinian theory of the sublime seems to honour literature less for its originary act than for subsequent acts of inflection, inversion, dissension (1067).
The ear is not a passive receptacle; it is a force that remakes what it hears (1067).
the text sustains a continuum of disagreement (1068).
Across time, its very words become unfixed, unmoored, and thus democratically claimable (1068).
The sharp differences in the patterns of sound . . . dramatize the vibrant openness of a resonant universe, the arguability of its words, the debatability of its nuances (1068).
Picking up noise as it travels across time, a text also picks up controversy, annoying and inspiring more and more readers, sharpening more and more ears at its expense (1068).