If Meaning Is Constructed, What Is It Made From? Toward a Cultural Theory of Reading

This essay explores the notion of meaning, particularly as applied to acts of producing and reading texts. The analysis is grounded in principles of activity theory and cultural semiotics and focuses on the ways in which reading takes place among readers and texts in a culturally mediated, codified experience characterized here as the “transactional zone.” The author builds on Vygotsky’s work to argue that meaning comes through a reader’s generation of new texts in response to the text being read. As a means of accounting for this phenomenon, examples are provided from studies illustrating, for instance, Vygotsky’s zones of meaning, the dialogic role of composing during a reading transaction, and the necessity of culturally constructed subjectivity in meaning construction. The author concludes by locating meaning in the transactional zone in which signs become tools for extending or developing concepts and the richness of meaning coming from the potential of a reading transaction to generate new texts. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass )