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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Reading is still often perceived as the decoding of a message, as if the text were meant to be merely received, as if it had been composed in a known and invariable code, and as if the meaning were determined solely by the author. Since at least the 1960s, however, theories of interpretation have constructed (literary) reading in a more elaborate and inventive fashion: while each author was supposed to invent a singular language against the background of the common language, each interpreter had to create something new, even interpreters reading the same text, because each interpreter understood the text and its singular language within an ever-changing context of actualization. The model of interpretation nevertheless remained indebted to the activity of deciphering: the ever-changing meaning was to be found in the text itself.