Unity Identity Text Self

Abstract

Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.

‘Toy Story’: The narrative world of entrepreneurship and the creation of interpretive communities

“…In so doing, I am concerned with the processes that facilitate the 'stretching away' of little entrepreneurial stories into transforming relations that go beyond the producer of that story and which 'pull in' or connect other people (even from different cultures) that are unrelated to the story. To examine this, reference is made to reader-response theory and criticism 1 (Iser, 1974;Holland, 1975;Bleich and Vargyai, 1978;Fish, 1980;Mailloux, 1982) which is concerned with the relationship between texts and their readers. Reader response theory became prominent in the 1970's in reaction to Beardsley and Wimsat's (1949) essay 'The Affective Fallacy' which privileges the text in its own right and separates the text from its effect.…”

The Performance and Construction of Subjectivities of Early Adolescent Girls in Book Club Discussion Groups

“…Holland (1975Holland ( , 1980 maintains that readers' responses are determined by identity themes that include an individual characteristic mode or style, developed over the period of one's life. As readers read, they seek to find a unity in what they read, "a central theme or meaning or idea around which the various details of the play or story come to a focus" (p.13).…”

“…This modernist definition of identity is consistent with the philosophy of humanism that holds that individuals embody an essence that is inviolable to change. Recognizing the importance of self in determining response to literature, literary critic Norman Holland (1980) describes a "primary identity," which stands as "an invariant which provides all the later transformations of the individual, as he develops, with an unchanging inner form or core of continuity" (p. 121). Holland describes any deviations from this essential core as merely variations on a central theme, much like the musician's variations on a single melody, displaying only surface changes while remaining fundamentally constant.…”

Intellectual Freedom and the Agnostic–Postmodernist View of Reading Effects

“…These theorists examine what the reader "gets out of" the text. For example, in Norman N. Holland's (1980) article on identity and text, he discusses the fantasy content that is found in literature which allows the reader to "create from the fantasy seemingly 'in' the work fantasies to suit their several character structures" (p. 126). The fifth approach, termed the sociological/historical approach, discusses reading as a collective phenomenon and is particularly concerned with issues of how one's social group determines what one reads.…”