Canon is closed. Long live fanon!

[slashpine]

In one sense no text is finished, since its potential range is always being extended to every additional reader.--Edward Said*

Make that: "... BY every additional reader."

*Edward Said, 'Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contemporary Criticism', The World, the Text and the Critic, London:Vintage, 1991, p. 157.

Comments

[slashpine]

Heh. I was flipping through Peter Child's Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches and there it was. So appropriate.

My next question then (b/c I am not trained in lit theory like you):

Is there such a thing, theoretically or empirically, as a truly "closed" text? And under what conditions can/does such a rare thing come to be?

Possible correlative footnote: "That which limits the true is not the false, but the insignificant. -- Paul Virilio

(In which I take the meaning of "insignificant" literally - as something not recognized, or 'constructed', through having a signifier.)

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Virilio, Paul, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener, London:Continuum, 2002, p. 17.