The Text World: Dense and One

Passive synthesis encompasses not only adjacent passages, but also distant locations in the same text. Readers can discover in prompted reflection connections and associations between many different themes, regardless of where they were mentioned. This is also how readers can encounter inconsistencies involving passages that are located far apart from each other, an ability no less fundamental for academic source criticism as it is for reading detective stories. What do such prompts to reflection show about the nature of passive synthesis (or whatever alternative model of latency one prefers)? The current chapter explores this with the help of the idea of a ‘world’. ‘World’ is here defined as the pre-disposition of readers to interconnect text meanings and other meaning experiences as belonging to a mundane unity and density. These are tacit expectations which prefigure, as their occasional discovery in the reader’s reflection shows, what themes in the text they have seen as ‘belonging together’ in any world. The chapter will show that such tacit expectations imply that in reading, the reader takes the text to project a ‘world’.