“Every text assumes a reader.”

— Alberto Manguel

Endpaper Pages, p. 314.
A History of Reading (1996)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Every text assumes a reader." by Alberto Manguel?

Alberto Manguel 63

writer 1948

Related quotes

“To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Metaphors of Reading, p. 168.
A History of Reading (1996)

“The aim of the scholarly editor is not to produce the the easiest text for the reader, but to get as near as he can to the text of the author.”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 142

“The reader collaborates with the author in every book, or The reader is co-author in every book.”

Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) French novelist

Tout livre a pour collaborateur son lecteur

Source: Biographical notice http://www.evene.fr/celebre/biographie/maurice-barres-499.php on Evene

“In literary translations, it is this very articulation of expressions that matters the most to bring home to the readers the full essence of the original text in question.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

<span class="plainlinks"> Foreword, 'Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika', Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DQPD8F4/</span>
From Prose

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

“Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 64-65

“A translator has divided loyalties. He has a duty to his author, a duty to his reader and a duty to the text. The three are by no means identical and are often hard to reconcile.”

David Hawkes (sinologist) (1923–2009) British sinologist

Preface to The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: 'The Crab-Flower Club' (1979), p. 20

“Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there — which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

“Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text.”

Abraham Pais (1918–2000) American Physicist

Prologue, p. xv
A Tale of Two Continents (1997)

“Every text assumes a reader.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Alberto Manguel 63

Related quotes

Related topics