Textual Performance: Where the Action at a Distance Is

Abstract

etorical, genre, and activity approaches to writing have accom plished important work in focusing attention on what texts do in situ and what people do with each other through the mediation of texts.1 These approaches understand persuasion, influence, and the accomplishment of acts through the transmission of texts among writers and readers. Textual influence is sometimes seen within an individual situation, as in the rhetorical analysis of specific texts with their social or political conse quences; sometimes it is understood within classes of activities and situations associated with a genre; and sometimes it is seen within regularly occurring interrelations among texts and actors within activity systems. These understandings of texts as accomplishing specialized acts in context, however, have militated against examin ing texts as conveyers of meanings, interpretable from the signs on the page. In this essay I develop an approach to meaning mediated by texts that is consistent with situated interactional accounts of writing, to account for what a text means to its writers and readers as well as what it does.

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