Thoughts on Olson Chs. 6-12

I am interested in how the "history" of literacy isn't really history and the implications of that for any sort of argument that literacy causes cognitive change. As Olson wrote and we touched on briefly in class tonight, there seems to be a line of theories for interpreting written texts, beginning with the text being a "boundless resource from which one could take an inexhaustible supply of meanings" to one in which "the meaning of a text is austerely anchored in the textual evidence" (p. 144). As religious texts were first written down, someone had to do the work of "fixing the text," and this occurred in the context of a oral culture in which meaning was derived from the words, but also from the illocutionary force provided by the speaker. Oral "texts" were layered with meaning, so how to convey that in written text?

I found it interesting as Olson traced these ideas of interpretation from the time of Charlemange when scholars would read texts as having much meaning beneath the words through to Luther's idea of text being an "autonomous representation of meaning" (p. 154) to the idea that readers must try to read texts thinking about how the original audience would have. My point is that these ways of interpreting don't seem to be a linear progression. Today, in 2007, we have people who read texts the way scholars in Charlemange's day did; we have those who read texts literally; and we have those who try to place texts within their historical and sociocultural context. We also have a million theories beside and within those. We still have our own ideas, whether cultural or individual, as to how texts should be received or interpreted.