The Relationship between Literary Works and the World

I would like to take the opportunity of our present theme, 'Old Challenges / New Horizons', not to report on any very particular aspect of my own research, but to offer some thoughts on issues which seem to me important for the nature and future of English literature as a discipline, on the basis of my experience as a scholar and teacher of English literature in the English university environment. Some of my observations and concerns no doubt relate specifically to the United Kingdom, and they might at least satisfy some of the curiosities you may have about the odd ways in which we British do things. Some of my observations however may have larger and European resonances. I speak as one who professes the discipline of English literature, but I shall be exploring areas where language studies have much to offer, and where the cooperation of literary and language expertise might well, it seems to me, be profitably explored. I am a scholar of the long eighteenth century, and both a practising and a theorising textual editor, and many of my examples, but not all, come from that period and that field. We are all of us familiar with the notion that English literature is chronically a discipline in crisis. In some ways that might seem an odd notion. The subject remains, throughout the world, intellectually vibrant and productive, and recruits well in a competitive world. Nevertheless, English literature has surely experienced, over the last three decades, a greater degree of internal methodological contest than any other. Self-examination is healthy; nosce teipsum. A continuous and unremitting state of self-questioning however has led, many believe, to a radical loss of disciplinary confidence and identity. The theory explosion of the seventies and eighties deconstructed many old certainties about texts and their understanding. The hermeneutics of suspicion have led many to read texts not for what they say, but for what they allegedly conceal. The notions that texts might be read for their avowed meanings, or that authorial intention might be a credible voucher of meaning, or that meanings might be in any sense determinable, fractured under these pressures. In a field of English literary studies in which I have a strong personal investment, textual editing and explanatory annotation, many theorists argued that not only the meaning of words, but the printed texts in which they appeared, were radically unstable. In the extreme case some theorists went on to assert that any pretence not only to credible textual editing, but to any kind of credible textual interpretation or explanation, or indeed to English itself

There has been some discussion about how far relevance theory can help in analysing the interpretation of literary works. Starting from the assumption that literary works are not entirely sui generis but exploit at least some of the abilities used in other varieties of verbal communication, I show how the same theoretical machinery used in analysing the interpretation of ordinary utterances can shed light on the interpretation of literary texts, and touch briefly on two more general issues: how can fictional works be relevant, and how can illocutionary and perlocutionary effects be disentangled in the case of literary works?

Journal of Pragmatics, 1991

Students of commonication from many disciplinary angles wdi fiad the book a readily available resource base. In spite of some vexing typographic errors, the volume is highly recommended for its comprehcnsive coverage. References

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 2023

When interpreting literary works, interpreters almost always rely on connections between the literary works and other aspects of our world-e.g., historical time periods, cultures, other artworks, artistic movements, and so on. But how can we explain both the nature and role of these connections? I argue that this can be fruitfully explained with reference to relations that exist between literary works and other aspects of human culture, which is a class of relations that I call 'interpretation-relevant relations. ' I also argue that an important component of these relations is a mind-independent connection of influence between the relata. Finally, I argue that these interpretation-relevant relations (with the component of influence) can be taken to be real, mind-independent elements of the world, if we recognize that literary works are public artifacts and so are part of the fabric of human culture, which depends on human minds for its existence and persistence but not for its ontological nature. All of this can hold even if interpretations are the products of individual minds interacting intentionally with literary works.

As the title of a famous horror film suggests, there are things in philosophy that seem to be dead, but "sometimes they come back". One of these, perhaps the most important, is ontology. In this essay, I will show that the return of ontology and its application to literature is neither scary nor dangerous; on the contrary, ontology may allow us to deal with several theoretical problems regarding the status of literary texts, of their contents and perhaps also of their significance. In this essay, therefore, I will develop the fundamental distinction between platonic ideas and emergent inscriptions, a distinction that in my view is fundamental for an adequate understanding of all literary objects. First of all, I want to show that a literary text is an "initiated type" , which means that it does not pre-exist in some transcendent dimension before the activity of its author; indeed, even if the latter can feel the power of inspiration, he is not just a copyist of a ready-made archetype, but the agent who gives form to that fuzzy power, making (in the sense of poiein, as a philologist would say) the text as it is. Secondly, I will show that the objects we can find in literature are entities and not nothing. However, for this same reason, when we deal with realistic fictions, we have not to reduce a character or a place to a real person or an actual place. Finally, I suggest to consider the text also as a semiotic device which can produce its own interpretations. These are in turn "initiated types" , realized by the readers in specific historical conditions. That is why two different analyses of the same literary text can be true with no contradiction: if x and y are the significances at stake, a commentary which expresses x is as true as another which expresses y, not only because of their hermeneutical validity (that is to say, because each commentary is adequate for the needs of its context), but also because both can fit in with the same semiotic object.

Poetics, 1993

JLT Articles, 2009

Interpretation in Empirical Studies of Literature and Media From their beginning in the 19th century literary studies have been rooted in the hermeneutic credo that the investigation of cultural artifacts differs fundamentally from the scientific explanation of ›natural‹ objects. As a consequence, literary studies have declared the hermeneutic interpretation of single works of fiction and poetry their key agenda. As Jannidis et al. have pointed out, the act of literary »interpretation« aims at the rule-guided reconstruction of the meaning of a text as whole; interpretation cannot be equated to meaning,-which figures as the result of interpretation-, but represents a complex procedure of the »assignment of meaning«. Accordingly, in literary studies the term interpretation is embedded into a wide range of theories of semantics, cognition, and communication that define criteria for the assignment of meaning to a literary text. Moreover, the term interpretation encompasses assumptions about how to theorize and validate phenomena in the fields of semantics, cognition, and communication (methodology and meta-theories respectively). Last, but not least, literary researchers usually formulate texts and use media in order to interpret literary texts, that is, the results of scientific investigation require interpretation in return. Thus, as has been pointed out by constructivist scholars, there is a peculiar »autologic« at work in literary studies and media research respectively. Facing the multi-faceted nature of the phenomenon in question, I will discuss the meaning of »interpretation« in empirical studies of literature and media on three levels, namely the epistemology, object theory, and methodology of interpretation. My argument will unfold as follows: I will first examine interpretation as an epistemological category that lays ground for non-dualistic positions in empirical studies in literature and media. This examination explores the autologic of observation and deals with the self-description of the research process by means of self-reflection. I will briefly portray the idea of interpretation in constructivist epistemology, where it converges with the idea of »construction« as the complex interplay of natural and cultural operations in a self-organized cognitive system that brings forth the world. I will then turn to the history of empirical studies of literature and media (ESLM). A short excursion back to the German origins of ESLM in the 1970s will demonstrate that the question of interpretation is inescapably amalgated with the way literary scholars define their object of investigation and, hence, with the way researchers decide on the relevance of research problems and research designs. An exemplary controversy on the theoretical status and necessity of literary interpretation in early ESLM between Norbert Groeben and Siegfried J. Schmidt will serve as a case in point. The shared theoretical core assumption of different Abstracts

The Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2017

ABSTRACT: The differences and difficulties found upon doing literary research are analyzed. The fact that researchers also interpret is highlighted as well as the need for sufficient time and freedom to do their research. The use of adequate selection criteria, the subjectivity and intuition of the exegete, as well as the use of concepts such as respect for the literal meaning (Umberto Eco) and the analogy of proportion (Inger Enkvist) are proposed as appropriate guidelines for establishing renovated, but systematic reading of texts. Keywords: literary theory, hermeneutics, research strategies, reading.

Forms of Truth and the Unity of Knowledge, ed. Vittorio Hösle, 2014