Roles that Create Contexts in the Interpretative Journey of Passages

Abstract

This article remembers two of the hypotheses proposed in text
semantics. The first concerns the roles that create contexts with
regard to interpretation. Interpretive practice encourages one to
return problems to their context: neighborhood (syntagm,
period); other passages of the text chosen by assimilation or
dissimilation, and still other passages from other texts chosen
as external interpreters. This interpretive contextualization
permits us to validate inherent characteristics or update afferent
traits by propagation. It transforms interpretation into an activity
(doing) more than a result (done).
The second hypothesis suggests that a work is composed of
unequal sequences from a point of view that is both qualitative
and quantitative. These text places are passages, in the sense
that a part of the work passes through them and that the
backgrounds and forms are susceptible to suffering modifications
there.
The purpose of this article is to cross these two hypotheses
in order to test them in one or various texts: following the
typology of the roles that create contexts with the idea of
underlining the function of passage and to justify the plausibility
of an interpretation.
Among others, the texts will be extracted from the dystopic
novel, The Handmaid’s Tale by the Canadian writer Margaret
Atwood.