reading is writing

I can't read Julia Kristeva's works as I read other books. With other books, a kind of momentum happens...one sentence leads to the next and a picture gradually emerges. But reading Kristeva, every sentence is like starting again and I have to keep bringing all of my cognitive resources to bear on what I'm reading. But at the same time, on a different level, it sometimes seems like she's stating the absolutely obvious or over-generalising. 

But when I think about it, that duality probably has less to do with what she writes, and more to do with the way I read it - my understanding of what she writes. And it's interesting that that idea - that I as a reader play an important role in the composition of meaning from the text/// so, in other words, the actual composition of the text - owes a lot to theorists like Kristeva herself, Barthes, Derrida, etc. 

It's not that I've read all of those theorists - although I have studied quite a lot of theory - but it's more the case that they have influenced academia which has been the source of my learning, teaching and thinking about literature and literary theory.