ows a critic to explore not what is particular to a given text but rather to explore shared conventions and codes across (say) one author's body of work or across the works of several authors.
However, Eagleton cautions that a critic may not always identify "'appropriate' codes for deciphering the text and then appl[y] them, so that the codes of the text and the codes of the reader gradually converge into a unitary knowledge" (108). More than this, he points out, any reader brings "extra-literary assumptions" (109) to a text. That means ideological presuppositions, knowledge about the social or personal authorial context. This leads to the issue of reader "competence" in the matter of describing the rules of "grammar" that give shape to a text. Eagleton (105) cites the notion of "the ideal reader or 'super-reader' posited by structuralism . . . in effect a transcendental subject absolved from all limiting social determinants." In theory, a reader of super competence is supremely objective, hence closer to the certainty of science, hence closer to the formalism of scientific method as applied to meanings that can be reached by and in a text. But Eagleton suggests that this is actually a
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