Meaning, intention, and context
what determines meaning? Sometimes we say that the meaning of an utterance is what someone means by it, as though the intention of a speaker determined meaning. Sometimes we say meaning is in the text you may have intended to say x. but what you said actually means y as if meaning were the product of the language itself Sometimes we say context is what determines meaning: to know what this particular utterance means, you have to look at the circumstances or the historical context in which it figures. Some critics claim, as I have mentioned, that the meaning of a text is the experience of the reader Intention, text context, reader-what determines meaning7
Now the very fact that arguments are made for all four factors shows that meaning is complex and elusive, not something once and for all determined by any one of these factors. A long-standing argument in literary theory concerns the role of intention in the determination of The m literary meaning. A famous article called The Intentional Fallacy'aques reader that for literary works arguments about interpretation are not settled by consulting the oracle(the author). The meaning of a work is not simple what the writer had in mind at some moment during composition of the subjec work, or what the writer thinks the work means after it is finished. but what i rather what he or she succeeded in embodying in the work. If in always ordinary conversation we often treat the meaning of an utterance as decide what the utterer intends, it is because we are more interested in what adopt determ the speaker is thinking at that moment than in his or her words, but literary wors are valued for the particular structures of words that they situatio have put into circulation. Restricting the meaning of a work to what an conce author might have intended remains a possible critical strategy, but then w usually these days such meaning is tied not to an inner intention but to advance analysis of the author's personal or historical circumstances what sort be able of act was this author performing. given the situation of the moment? context This strategy denigrates later responses to te work, suggesting that the work answers the concerns of its moment of creation and only Majors accidentally the concerns of subsequent readers.
critics who defend the notion that intention determines meaning seem argues to fear that if we deny this, we place readers above authors and decree unackr that'anything goes in interpretation. But if you come up with an engag interpretation. you have to persuade others of its pertinence, or else it road, will be dismissed. No one claims that'anything goes'. As for authors enslav isn't it better to honour them for the power of their creations to sugge stimulate endless thought and give rise to a variety of readings than backg for what we imagine to be a work's original meaning? None of this is colon to say that authors statements about a work have no interest: for life at many critical projects they are especially valuable, as texts to bound juxtapose with the text of the work. They may be crucial, for example discus analysing the thought of an author or discussing the ways in which a work might have complicated or subverted an announced view or Intention.
The meaning of a work is not what the author had in mind at some point, nor ist simply a property of the text or the experience of a reader. Meaning is an inescapablenoton because itis not something simple or simply determined. It is simultaneously an experience ofa subject and a property of a text. It is both what we understand and what in the text we try to understand. Arguments about meaning are always possible, and in that sense meaning is undecided, always to be decided. subject to decisions which are never irrevocable. If we must adopt some overall principle or formula, we might say that meaning is determined by context. since context includes rules of language, the situation of the author and the reader, and anything else that might conceivably be relevant. But if we say that meaning is context-bound then we must add that context is boundless: there is no determining in advance what might count as relevant. what enlarging of context might be able to shift what we regard as the meanng of a text Mean ng is context-bound, but context is boundless
Major shifts in the interpretation of literature brought about by theoretical discourses might. in fact. be thought of as the result of the widening or redescription of context. For example. Toni Morrison argues that American literature has been deeply marked by the often E unacknowledged historical presence of slavery. and that this literature's engagements with freedom the freedom of the frontier, of the open road, of the unfettered imagination should be read in the context of enslavement. from which they take significance. And Edward Said has suggested that Jane Austen's novels should be interpreted against a background which is excluded from them: the exploitation of the colonies of the Empire which provides the wealth to support a decorous life at home in Britain. Meaning is context-bound. but context is boundless, always open to mutations under the pressure of theoretical discussions.
Accounts of hermeneutics frequently distinguish a hermeneutics of recovery. which seeks to reconstruct the original context of production (the circumstances and intentions of the author and the meanings a text might have had for its original readers, from a hermeneutics of suspicion. which seeks to expose the unexamined assumptions on which a text may rely(political. sexual. philosophical, linguistic). The first may celebrate the text and its author as it seeks to make an original message accessible to readers today, while the second is often said to deny the authority of the text. But these associations are not fixed and can we be reversed: a hermeneutics of recovery, in restricting the text to some supposedly original meaning remote from our concerns may reduce its power, while a hermeneutics of suspicion may value the text for the way in which. unbeknownst to its author, it engages and helps us to rethink issues of moment today perhaps subverting assumptions of its author in the process. More pertinent than this distinction may be a distinction between(1) interpretation which takes the text, in its functioning, to have something valuable to say(this might be either reconstructive or suspicious hermeneutics) and(2) 'symptomatic' interpretation which treats the text as the symptom of something non- textual. something supposedly deeper. which is the real source of interest, be it the psychic life of the author or the socal tensions of an era or the homophobia of bourgeois society. Symptomatic interpretation neglects the specificity of the object- it is a sign of something else and so is not very satisfying as a mode of interpretation. but when it focuses on the cultural practice of which the work is an instance, it can be useful to an account of that practice Interpreting a poem as a symptom or instance of features of the lyric. for example, might be unsatisfactory hermeneutics but a useful contribution to poetics. To this I now turn.