Liberating the Reader

The significance of reading is explored through the interaction between the self and the world.
Experiences are perceived and interpreted as texts, words, and letters.
The development of personal awareness parallels the act of reading, as individuals learn and evolve.
The act of reading literary texts contributes to broader human development and understanding of both personal experiences and social contexts.
Learning to read is portrayed as a critical facet of acquiring knowledge and creativity.
The idea posits that understanding the world (through reading) is foundational to literary reading. Writing new texts is illustrated as a transformative act, impacting the world itself.

Source Reference: Paulo Freire, 1985: 5

Literary texts are characterized as a form of writing that is an “organized violence committed on ordinary speech” (Roman Jakobson).
- Everyday speech is regarded as the “normal” language.
- Literary texts deviate from and transform everyday language.
- Key features of literary texts:
- Texture
- Rhythm
- Resonance of words that goes beyond abstractable meanings
- Disproportion between signifiers and signifieds
Note: This definition presents challenges as it suggests a singular “normal” language, which does not exist in a homogenous linguistic community.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1986: 964) argued that the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
Signs derive their meanings through conventions, which are shared by a community with similar practices and experiences.
Key questions regarding meaning arise, such as:
- What source grants a literary work its meaning?
- Is it the author’s intention?
- The text itself?
- The reader's interpretation?

From a Reader-Response Perspective:
- A reader's interpretation and reaction to a text hold equal value to the text itself.
The reader’s experience framework is critical, analogous to the text's structure.
In Is There a Text in the Class? (1980), Fish indicates that competent readers belong to “interpretive communities,” where they share reading “interpretive strategies” or “community assumptions.”
Each strategy provides a means to create objective features, allowing readers to infer meanings about intentions, and the roles of speakers and authors.

Shared assumptions and strategies among community members are vital for the collaborative creation of meaning in texts.
Values and meanings of texts are relative to the frameworks of specific interpretive communities.
The interpretation of texts emerges from the reader's perceptions and the beliefs inherent in their respective interpretive communities.

Reference: From Stanley Fish’s “Interpreting the Variorum” (1990)

Consider two readers interpreting Shakespeare:
- One reader, raised in a coastal town in Cebu.
- The other, raised in an urban setting.

Interpretation strategies shape the reading process, consequently influencing the formulation of texts.
- These strategies are shaped by varying conventions such as education, family background, friendships, and religious influences.
The objective of “Literatures for Development” emphasizes community empowerment, utilizing interpretive strategies for reading, interpreting, and creating texts.

Text Excerpt:
- "The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded.
- And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard.
- But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably,
- And the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle.
- And I won't even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God."