Study of literature

In short, it would be possible to demonstrate that, given its premises, the New Criticism was necessarily an interpretive criticism.

But in fact it is scarcely necessary to make out such a case, for the most important and insidious legacy of the New Criticism is the widespread and unquestioning acceptance of the notion that the critic's job is to interpret literary works. Indeed, fulfillment of the interpretive task has come to be the touchstone by which other kinds of critical writing are judged, and reviewers inevitably ask of any work of literary theory, linguistic analysis, or historical scholarship, whether it actually assists us in our understanding of particular works.

In this critical climate it is therefore important, if only as a means of loosening the grip which interpretation has on critical consciousness, to take up a tendentious position and to maintain that, while the experience of literature may be an experience of interpreting works, in fact the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of literature. To engage in the study of literature is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear but to advance one's understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse.-

Johnathan Culler, "Beyond Interpretation," in The Pursuit of Signs, originally published around 1976.

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Meaningful statements

The logical grounds of interpretation have gone entirely—especially when we deal with the literary text, which is “above the norm” in rhetorical meaning.

Both logic and grammar are questionable when we read a literary text. Grammar assumes a simple logical one-to-one relationship between language unit (word, sentence, etc.) and meaning. Rhetoric contests that assumption. Logic postulates the possibility of universal truth (a concept that independently of its objects remains unchangeable, eternal and unaffected by rhetoric). We know from de Saussure that such a concept has no place in a system like the language system, which provides meaning only through the values that the differences between signifiers allow.

In other words, when we make meaningful statements we do so by acting on the combined resources of difference and rhetorical substitution. This gives us considerable freedom but at a cost—we can no longer hope to control or to limit the structures of linguistic meaning and the multiple possibilities of confusion that always threaten.

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Rhetorical reading

The grounds of literary meaning (and by extension all meaning) must be located in rhetoric rather than in any of the other possible dimensions (form, content, reference, grammar, logic etc.).

But a rhetorical reading cannot guarantee authority over interpretations. Therefore there is no authority that can guarantee a reading. This doesn’t license us to read a text just anyway we want to. Rather it commits us to readings that take full account of the possibilities and limits of reading (and writing) generally.

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Nutritious centre

How does the metaphor work?

Imagine a nut. A nut has a shell that, once removed, yields a nutritious centre. This is what Paul de Man means by the following statement: “when form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seems superficial and expendable.” The formalists, on the other hand, taught that it is the shell, rather than its content, that is important in literature. So when Paul de Man observes that the trend in literary criticism has moved from form to reference, what interests him is the underlying metaphor that governs how we have up until now always—without thinking about it too much—imagined meaning to come about. That is, before we interpret a text we have already accepted an interpretation—based upon a metaphor—of what interpretation is. It is this unwitting interpretation of interpretation that interests de Man.

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Correspondence and thruth

Many philosophers dislike the correspondence theory — that truth is something that corresponds to the facts — precisely because of this naive acceptance of "the facts."

Even at its basic level, things in the world are not directly given to us: we make interpretations and intelligent integrations of our sensory experience, as Kant claimed and extensive studies of the physiology of perception show all too plainly. Scientists make observations in ways guided by contemporary practice and the nature of the task in hand.

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Belief and meaning

Davidson points out that beliefs and meanings are inseparable.

A person holds a sentence true based on what he believes and what he takes the sentence to mean. If the interpreter knew what a person believed when that person held a sentence to be true, the meaning of the sentence could then be inferred. Vice versa, if the interpreter knew what a person took a sentence to mean when that person held it to be true, the belief of the speaker could be inferred.
So Davidson doesn't allow the interpreter to have access to beliefs as evidence, since the interpreter would then be begging the question. Instead, Davidson allows that the interpreter can reasonably ascertain when a speaker holds a sentence true, without knowing anything about a particular belief or meaning.

This will then allow the interpreter to construct hypotheses relating a speaker and an utterance to a particular state of affairs at a particular time.

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Radical interpretation

What radical interpretation highlights is what is necessary and sufficient for communication to occur.

These conditions are: that in order to recognize a speaker as a speaker, their beliefs must be mostly coherent and correct; indeterminacy of meaning doesn’t undermine communication, but it must be constrained just enough.

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Prior assumptions about meaning

Suppose that we are faced with a speaker whose language we do not understand and of whose beliefs we have no prior knowledge. How should we interpret her linguistic behaviour?

As part of his answer to this question, Donald Davidson introduces his holism: we can ascribe beliefs to a speaker only on the basis of prior assumptions about meaning, and vice versa. Here, too, we find Davidson’s thesis of the indeterminacy of interpretation: there will be many different assignments of meaning and belief that fit equally well with a given speaker’s behaviour.

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Variety of perspectives

A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another.

It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader.

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Reading path

Although you cannot change my text, you can write a response and then link it to my document.

You thus have read the readerly text in several ways not possible with a book: you have chosen your reading path, and since you, like all readers, will choose individualized paths, the hypertext version of this book would probably take a very different form, perhaps suggesting the values of alternate routes and probably devoting less room in the main text to quoted passages.

You might have also have begun to take notes or produce responses to the text as you read, some of which might take the form of texts that either support or contradict interpretations proposed in my texts.

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