What Is Text?

What is text? Is the text a product of the author? A product of society? The author itself or maybe even society? These questions have been the subject of intense analyses of literary critics for the past century, spawning ideological paradigms and schools that have in turn governed ways of reading. I would now like to place myself (for the time being, mind you) within a specific school of thought to try to aid further understanding of Rochester. I take my que from the American critic Paul de Man. He says:

It can be said that there is a perceptual consciousness of the object and an experience of this consciousness, but the working out of a logos of this experience or, in the case of art, of a form of this experience, encounters considerable difficulties. Almost immediately the existential status of the experience seems to be in question, and we conclude by considering as constructed that which at first appeared to be given: instead of containing or reflecting experience, language constitutes it. (De Man 1987: 102-3)

Text or discourse can be understood as the reality as it appears to us (everyone remember the Matrix?). To understand an experience, we have to incorporate it into familiar discourse. We have to name new ideas and new inventions to understand them by comparison with older and more familiar concepts. De Man calls for analysis of literary works based on this premise of the language that cannot wholly encompass experience or objects. „The problem of criticism is no longer to discover to what experience the form refers, but how it can constitute a world, a totality of beings without which there would be no experience.“