The Synthesis of Texts as a Synthesis of Life

The reader’s sense of a text can dynamically change even within the space of a single first reading, let alone in repeated readings. The current chapter provides illustrations of this. The analysis reveals, among other things, the role in reading of assumptions, usually culturally anchored, of what constitutes text coherence. As in the case of other dimensions of the reading process, the reader may encounter such assumptions in their reflective response to prompts from passive synthesis. Speaking generally, readers passively protain that the text and the world it projects will turn out to hang together somehow; and that understanding any new passage will constitute an epistemic gain on some aspect of the text-projected world, whether taken as factual or fictional. This protention of coherence explains how readers can notice certain kinds of errors in their reading, and also how they can learn from the text ‘for life’. Since passive synthesis includes the meaning experiences both of the reader’s ‘life’ and of the text, the text meanings are sensitive to historical differences between reader contexts and reading practices.