00 Pluralism: The commibnent to multiple interp...,tions and the rejectlon of the notion of an unquestionable central authority, whether in critical or political matters. Pluralists

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refuse to privilege any one interpretation of a text or ideological position, and encourage diversity. -

Readerly fiction: Roland Barthes's term for fiction which imposes a particular reading of the text on the reader, and attempts to close off alternative interpretations. g_ ~ 19th-century novelistic realism, with its carefully worked-out plots and explicit moral messages, is a prime example of this style of writing.

Reception theory: Reception theorists concentrate on the interaction of reader and text (reader-response being another name for the approach). Textual meaning is seen to emerge from the reader's engagement with the text, with some theorists ~ claiming that the reader is almost entirely responsible for the creation of that meaning.

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\jfj Reflection theory: Reflection theorists assume that artistic artefacts reflect the ideology of their culture. Thus, for the Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, the art of a bourgeois culture could not help but reveal the character of that culture. Art has a rather passive cultural role from this perspective. -

Repressive State Apparatus: Louis Althusser's term for those forces, such as the police and the army, which the ruling class relies on to enforce its control over a society- by violent means if necessary.

Rhizome: For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the rhizome became a model for how systems ideally should develop. Rhizomatic structures (such as tubers or moss) can make connections between any two points on their surface; a process which these thinkers considered to be inherently creative and anti-authoritarian.

Schizoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's attack on Freudian ~ psychoanalysis led them to develop the concept of schizoanalysis, in which schizophrenia was taken as a model of how to resist the methods of the ~ psychoanalyst. The multiple personalities of the schizophrenic frustrated the ro psychoanalytic desire to turn us into socially conformist individuals.

Seduction: Jean Baudrillard's method for subverting systems is based on the notion of "seducing" or "beguiling" them into submission, rather than resorting to the more usual means of overt political action or revolution.

00 - Semiology: Ferdinand de Saussure predicted the development of semiology -

"the science of signs" - in his Course in General Linguistics (1916). Language itself, in Saussure's formulation, was a system of signs (q.v.) which operated according to an underlying grammar. All sign-systems were assumed to work on this linguistic model.

~ Semiotics: Although it is sometimes used interchangeably with semiology (q.v.) to 00 mean ''the science of signs", semiotics has also come to refer to the operation of ~ signs in a given system. Thus, one speaks of the semiotics of film or fashion.

~ Sign/Signified/Signifier: For Ferdinand de Saussure, language is made up of signs, which consist of an arbitrary signifier (word) and a signified (concept) joined in 172