A Text in the Communicative Dimension: The Relationship between the Open and Closed Text in the Context of Umberto Eco’s Ideas

• Main Author: Olga Gilyazova
• Format: Article
• Language: Turkish
• Published: Selçuk University 2021-06-01
• Series: Selçuk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi
• Subjects: author and reader; code; communication; hypertext; interpretation
• Online Access: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/1792335
• ISSN: 2458-908X; 2458-908X

The article addresses the relationship between open and closed texts. The aim of the study is to analyze the specifics of relationship between the open and closed text in the general context of communication between the author and the reader. While supporting mainly U. Eco’s concept in our article, we furnish it with the analysis of four approaches of openness/closedness, which we have singled out. Openness/closedness is conceptualized, firstly: as an ontological perspective of the opposition between the communication parameters: The text-as-process and text-as-outcome; secondly, as interpretation procedures that are common for the articulation of all texts, regardless of their form and contents; thirdly, as the ontological and technological potential of works’ physical unfinishedness that invite the recipient to co-authorship (for example, ‘the work-in-movement’ and hypertext); fourthly, as the ability of a text to provoke multiple or unambiguous interpretations. We also demonstrate that the way of text’s functioning is determined not only by the addressee's attitude to it, but text itself, in return, stimulates this attitude, predisposing to it by its specificity (as informative or artistic, kitsch or art, hypertext or linear text, digital or analog). However, as we explain in the conclusion, the dialectic of openness/closedness can affect the distinctness of these dichotomies: The text can use its openness manipulatively, which turns it into a closed text.