Reading Texts, Literacy, and Textual Authority

Each of the references above makes language central to the ways in which power constructs and produces not only meanings and cultural texts but also the subject positions that readers assume in engaging texts as well as the larger world. In Foucaulťs work, discourse is connected to broader institutional and social practices and the power relations which inform them. In this case, discourse is studied in terms of institutional apparatuses that produce it along with the interests and social practices it legitimates. In the second quote, discourse is seen by Gonzalez as not only enmeshed in relations of power but central to the production of complex and often contradictory forms of subjectivity, that is, the subject positions from which one's sense of self, identity, and subjectivity is constructed. Implicit in this view is the postmodernist notion that subjectivity is not a coherent, unitary,