[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Is this thread still going?? Wow...seems to me that there's an awful lot of energy being spent on what is, in the end, an entirely subjective matter of readerly preference or response to the text.

I think the one thing we can deduce from this is that some people feel as though their responses to the text are "right" and therefore any resposne which is different from theirs is "wrong" and thus a threat.

Others think that their responses to the text are theirs alone and don't need to be related to anyone else's.

Still others think that there is no such thing as a response to the text, but the imposition upon it of the reader's own views.

And finally, still others seem to think that there is no reader, only the text.

I would suggest that the act of reading is itself the dynamic composite of all these positions at one and the same time. That's why it's so much fun, because there is so much happening in the tense and endless relation of author/text and reader/community.

My three Canadian cents (to make two American cents).