“[A] literary work can be seen as constructing what have been called ‘subject positions’. Homer did not anticipate that I personally would read his poems, but his language, by virtue of the ways it is constructed, unavoidably offers certain ‘positions’ for a reader, certain vantage-points from which it can be interpreted. To understand a poem means grasping its language as being ‘oriented’ towards the reader from a certain range of positions: in reading, we build up a sense of what kind of effects this language is trying to achieve (‘intention’), what sorts of rhetoric it considers appropriate to use, what assumptions govern the kinds of poetic tactics it employs, what attitudes towards reality these imply. None of this need be identical with the intentions, attitudes and assumptions of the actual historical author at the time of writing, as is obvious if one tries to read William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience as the ‘expression’ of William Blake himself. We may know nothing about the author, or the work may have had several authors (who was the ‘author’ of the Book of Isaiah, or of Casablanca?), or to be an acceptable author at all in a certain society may mean writing from a certain ‘position’. Dryden could not have written ‘free verse’ and still have been a poet. Understanding these textual effects, assumptions, tactics and orientations is just to understand the ‘intention’ of the work. And such tactics and assumptions may not be mutually coherent: a text may offer several mutually conflicting or contradictory ‘subject positions’ from which to be read. In reading Blake’s Tyger poem, the process of building up an idea of where the language is coming from and what it is aimed at is inseparable from the process of constructing a ‘subject position’ for ourselves as readers. What kind of reader do the poem’s tone, rhetorical tactics, stock of imagery, armoury of assumptions imply? How does it expect us to take it? Does it seem to expect us to take its propositions at face value, thus confirming us as readers in a position of recognition and assent, or is it inviting us to assume a critical, dissociating position from what it offers? Is it, in other words, ironic or satirical? More disturbingly, is the text trying to stand us ambiguously between the two options, eliciting from us a kind of consent while seeking simultaneously to undermine it?”
— Terry Eagleton, “Structuralism and Semiotics,” Literary Theory: An Introduction
