Poetics versus hermeneutics
Here there is a basic distinction, too often neglected in llterary studies. between two kinds of projects one. modelled on linguistics, takes meanings as what have to be accounted for and tries to work out how they are possible. The other, by contrast starts with forms and seeks to interpret them, to tell us what they really mean.In literary studies ths is a contrast between poetics and hemeneutos. Poetics with attested meanings effects and how they are acheved what makes this passage in a novel seem ironic? What makes us sympathize with this particular character? Why is the ending of this poem ambiguous7) Hermeneutics. on the other hand. starts with texts and ass what they mean, seeking to discover new and better Hermeneutic models come from the fields of law and interpretations. religion, where people seek to interpret an authoritative legal or sacred text in order to decide how to act.
The linguistic model suggests that literary study should take the first track, of poetics trying to understand how works achieve the effects eak they do. but the modem tradition of criticism has overwhelmingly taken the second. making the interpretation of individual works the payoff ol literary study. In fact. works of literary criticism often combine poetics and hermeneutics. asking how a particular effect is achieved or why an ending seems ght(both matters of poetics. but also asking what particular line means and what a poem tells us about the human condition(hermeneutics). But the two projects are in principle quite distinct, with different goals and different kinds of evidence. Taking meanings or effects as the point of departure(poetics) is fundamentally different from seeking to discover meaning(hermeneutics).
if literary studies took lingulstics as a model. its task would be to describe the literary competence that readers of literature acquire. A poetics describing literary competence would focus on the conventions that make possible literary structure and meaning what are the codes or systems of convention that enable readers to identify literary genres recognize plots create rs out of the scattered details provided the text, identify themes in Iterary wors and pursue the kind of symbolic interpretation th allows us to gauge the significance of poems and stories?
This analogy between poetics and linguistics may seem misleading, for we don't know the meaning of a literary work as we know the meaning of John is eager to please and therefore can't take meaning as a given but have to seek it. This is certainly one reason why literary studies in modern times have favoured hermeneutics over poetics(the other reason is that people generally study literary works not because they are interested in the functioning of literature but because they think these works have important things to tell them and want to know what they are). But poetics does not require that we know the meaning of a work: its task is to account for whatever effects we can attest to-forexample, that one ending is more successful than another, that this combination of images in a poem makes sense while another does not. Moreover, a crucial part of poetics is an account of how readers do go about interpreting literary works-what are the conventions that enable them to make sense of works as they do. For instance, what I called in Chapter 2 the hyper-protected cooperative principle is a basic convention that makes possible the interpretation of literature: the assumption that difficulties, apparent nonsense. digressions. and irrelevancies have a relevant function at some level.