Readers and meaning
The idea of literary competence focuses attention on the implicit knowledge that readers(and writers) bring to their encounters with texts: what sort of procedures do readers follow in responding to works as they do? What sort of assumptions must be in place to account for ther reactions and interpretations? Thinking about readers and the way they make sense of literature has led to what has been called reader response criticism'. which claims that the meaning of the text is the experience of the reader(an experience that includes hesitations. conjectures, and self-corrections). If a literary work is conceived as a succession of actions upon the understanding of a reader, then an interpretation of the work can be a story of that encounter, with its ups and downs: various conventions or expectations are brought into play. connections are posited. and expectations defeated or confirmed. To interpret a work is to tell a story of reading.
But the story one can tell about a given work depends upon what theorists have called the readers horizon of expectations'. A work is interpreted as answering questions posed by ths horizon of expectations, and a reader of the 1990s approaches Hamlet with expectations different from those of a contemporary of Shakespeare's. A whole range of factors can affect readers horizons of expectations. Feminist criticism has debated what difference it makes. what difference it should make. if the reader is a woman. How. Elaine Showalter asks does the hypothesis of a female reader change our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes? uterary texts and the traditions of their interpretation seem to have presumed a male reader and induced women readers to read as a man. from a male point of view. Smilarly.film theorists have hypothes zed that what they call the cinematic gaze(the view from the position of the camera) is essentially male: women are positioned as the object of the cinematic gaze rather than as the observer.In literary studies feminist critics have studied the various strategies by which works make a male perspective the normative one and have debated how the study of such structures and effects should change ways of reading-for men as well as Women.
Interpretation
Focus on historical and socul varutions in ways of reading emphasies that interpreting is a social practice Readers interpret informally when the de they talk to friends about books or films they interpret to themselves as they read For the more formal interpretation tut takes place in But ho classrooms, there are different protocols For any clement of a work. you can ask what it does, how it relates to other elements, but interpretation may ultimately involve playing the about game to, what is this work really about? This qunten is not prompted by the obscurity of a text: it is even more appropriatr for imple tnts than for wickedly complex ones In this game the answer met mnt certain To conditions it cannot be obvious, for instancr it must be can t m say Hamlet is about a prince in Denmark is to refuse to pay the game But Hamlet is about the breakdown of the usabethun warlderder: Hamlet is about men's fear of femnine e alty." or"He h unreliability of signs count as possible amwers what are commonly seen as'schools of literary criticsm or theorrtical approaches to literature are, from the point of view of hermeneutici dapostiom to Mean give particular kinds of answers to the quetion of whit a work ultimately about': 'the class struggle' (Maniam the pos bllty utter an unifying experience(the New Criticism). Oedipal conflict (psychoanalysis). the containment of subversive energies(new historicism, the asymmetry of gender relations(feminam, the self- deconstructive nature of the text' (deconstruction), The occlusion imperialism" (post-colonial theory). the heterosexual matrix(gay and lesbian studies). utter an context
The theoretical discourses named in parentheses are not primarily modes of interpretation: they are accounts of what they take to be context particularly important to culture and society. Many of these theories include accounts of the functioning of literature or ordiscourse generally, and so partake of the project of poetics: but as versions of hermeneutics they give rise to partcular types of interpretation In which tet are mapped into a target language what isimportantin the game of interpretation is not the answer you come up with as my parodies show. some versions of the answer become. by definition. predictabe what's important is how you get there. what you do with the details of the text in relating them to your answer But how do we choose between interpretations? As my examples may suggest. at one level there is no need to decide whether Hamet is ultimately about. say, Renaissance politics, men's relations to their mothers, or the unreliability of signs. The liveliness of the institution of literary study depends on the twin facts that such arguments are never settled, and(2) arguments have to be made about how particular scenes or combinations of lines support any particular hypothesis. You can't make a work mean just anything it resists. and you have to labour E to convince others of the pertinence of your reading. For the conduct of such arguments. a key question is what determines meaning. We return to this central issue.