Notes towards a Complex Textual Legitimacy Proclamation

Esoteric literature presupposes that there are basic truths which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man, because they would do harm to many people who, having being hurt, would naturally be inclined to hurt in turn him who pronounces the unpleasant truths.

To write a book is essentially to give a public teaching…

The seemingly infinite variety of ways in which a given teaching can be understood does not do away with the fact that the originator of the doctrine understood it in one way only, provided he was not confused.

My argument is not uncontroversial.

This might be, at least in part, a construction and the projection into the past of a personal project.

The ability to produce the intangible is always dependent on a specific cultural faculty of perception and apprehension.

Earlier commentary editions of vernacular literature generally restricted themselves to random comments on the text and the actions of the protagonists, without any attempt to produce a systematic analysis of the text as a whole.

If you should ever need my life, then come and take it.

So I invoke unities like 'marketing' and 'social construction', and indeed 'mainstream' merely in order to destabilise and then reconstruct them in the pursuit of my own literary marketing agenda.

Generating understanding into how various texts have been worked up, sustained and defended through language and other symbolic practices allows for space, I argue, within which creative and increasingly valuable research can ensue.

Each text, laboratory, author and discipline strives to establish a world in which its own interpretation is made more likely by virtue of the increasing number of people from whom it extracts compliance.

Overall I feel such an approach is slightly disappointing.

First, trash connotes that which ought to be discarded, a sort of instant garbage; second, it connotes cheapness, shoddiness, the overflow of the capitalist commodity system. Third, it connotes a superficial glitter designed to appeal to those whose tastes are ill-formed according to the dominant perspective…Fourth, trash is excessive: it has more vulgarity, more tastelessness, more offensiveness than is necessary for its function as a cheap commodity.

The familiar argument is that in order to inform the audience you must first gain its attention.

The high standards of yesterday are being undermined by sensationalism, prurience, triviality, malice, and plain, simple credulity.

According to various media theorists and experts, the growth of media and cultural industries and the rise of the information society coincides with a pervasive sense of declining cultural, educational and political standards or 'dumbing down'.

While there may be more information available, the quality of this information as well as public understanding is declining. Public ignorance and apathy is growing as the serious, challenging and truthful is being pushed aside by the trivial, sensational, vulgar and manipulated.

Through an analysis of the genre's unique signifying process and generic conventions, this analysis will illuminate a dynamic relationship between textual producers and consumers that necessitates the devolpment of a new theoretical model for examining audiences, what I will call the "productive" audience model.