I present some objections to traditional literary interpretation and consider subversive interpretation as a solution to these problems. Subversive interpretation may seem more scientific and more democratic than traditional interpretation, but it is open to doubt that it is more democratic.

Let me start with my general thesis: that psychoanalysis has gone through three phases. It has been a psychology first of the unconscious, second as psychology of the ego, and today, I believe, a psychology of the self. . . . To a surprising extent, the modern American literary critic has sought the same impersonal, generalized kind of quasi-scientific knowledge. We anglophones reacted against the over-indulgence in subjectivity by Victorian and Georgian critics. We also reacted against the uncritical use (...) of extraliterary knowledge, connections that were often aimless and unconvincing between literary works and their authors' autobiographies or literary periods. We sought instead an analytical rigor, at first by searching out the organic unity of particular literary works, then by extending the methods of close reading we developed that way to the total works of an author, to myths and popular arts, to the language of everyday life, and even to such artifices as Volkswagens, supermarkets, and political candidates. Norman N. Holland is professor of English and director of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of six books, of which Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare , The Dynamics of Literary Response , Poems in Persons , and Five Readers Reading deal directly with problems of psychological criticism. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Human Identity" and "Why Ellen Laughed". (shrink)

The paper proposes a radical change of focus for understanding the fundamental purpose and value of literary interpretation. It criticises an orthodox view in analytical philosophy of literature, according to which theories of meaning in the philosophy of language, in particular Gricean or speech act or other pragmatic theories, offer the most illuminating way to grasp the relevant principles of interpretation. The argument here is that the application of such theories in this context is not just wrong (...) in detail (this or that theory needs revising) but wrong in principle. The focus is wrong. The importation of philosophy of language distorts the essential character of interpretation, which should be seen as involving not so much meaning as value, not individual sentences but whole works, not obsessed with authorial intention but focused on the protocols of reading. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Language, Truth, and Literary Interpretation: A Cross-cultural ExaminationYanfang TangReflections on the philosophy of language in China and the West suggest that philosophers’ critiques of language center on two issues: its inadequacy and its metaphoricity. The former indicates the inability of the signifier to capture the multiplicity of the signified, whereas the latter reflects the semantic surplus of the signifier over its referent. While modern Western philosophers focus (...) on the metaphoricity, frequently referred to as the “play,” of the sign, philosophers in traditional China targeted what they believed to be the inherent inadequacies of words in their discussions. 1 Both aspects of language are considered the cause of equivocal or ineffective speech, and thus of impediment to correct understanding, and yet philosophers of the two cultural traditions have come to different conclusions about reading or literary study.To Western philosophers and literary critics, the metaphoricity of language incurs a serious problem for reading. Because the sign, in its incessant play, always points to more than is needed to the point that its real reference is blurred or covered up, correct reading of a literary text becomes impossible. Such phrases, frequently appearing in contemporary critical writings as “the tyranny of words,” “the indeterminacy of meaning,” and “the unreadable text,” testify to the widespread concern about the problems of language in the West. On the other hand, despite their acute awareness of the intrinsic deficiency of words, Chinese philosophers and poets never gave up their hope in the efficacy [End Page 1] of writing and literary understanding. Indeed, the enterprise of creative writing and literary criticism boomed in China at the time when the philosophical aphorism that “words do not exhaust meaning” (yan bu jin yi) was brought home to almost every poet and critic flourishing between the third and fourth centuries. For the following one and a half millennia the question of the objectivity of meaning, the crux of Western post-structuralist discourse and quarrels, has never been raised in Chinese philosophical or literary discussions. This wide contrast of outlooks on reading informed by the same disillusionment with language is rather intriguing. To account for this phenomenon this article attempts to look at the differences in the way language is perceived and practiced in China and the West. It shall also probe into the concepts of truth underlying the two cultural traditions because such an inquiry sheds some important light on the different perceptions people in the two parts of the world hold concerning language and literary practice.Metaphoricity: The Way In or Out of the Dilemma?It is interesting to say that while twentieth-century discoveries about the metaphoricity of language have made some Western critics conclude that “all reading is misreading” and that “there is no such a thing as an objective meaning,” this same awareness—that language is essentially metaphorical in nature, that it always says more than what it appears to—posed a solution for Chinese philosophers and poets to get out of the linguistic dilemma in which they found themselves. But before we enter the topic, let us first look at the dominant views of language in each cultural tradition. First, as Yip Wai-lim and others have demonstrated, the Chinese philosophical tradition began with a rejection of language as a reliable means for cognition and expression. 2 Philosophers in ancient China viewed language, or in their own terminology, words, as an instrument for expressing ideas in the mind or describing objects in the world, but they considered them inherently limited and thus unable to carry out their tasks effectively. The earliest statement of this conception is recorded in the ancient classic the Book of Changes, where it says: “Writing does not exhaust words, and words do not exhaust meaning.” 3 Attributed to Confucius and thus also representing Confucian ideas, 4 this statement was elaborated, amplified, and developed into a systematic argument by Daoist (Taoist) philosophers Lao [End Page 2] Zi and Zhuang Zi (369?-286? bc). Approaching the issue from the perspective of Dao (Tao), these founders of Daoist school viewed language as intrinsically limited in its function of representing Dao. This is because Dao, the cosmic principle or pattern, is dynamic in... (shrink)

Literature has been philosophically understood as a practice in the last thirty years, which involves “modes of utterance” and stances, not intrinsic textual properties. Thus, the place for semantics in philosophical inquiry has clearly diminished. Literary aesthetic appreciation has shifted its focus from aesthetic realism, based on the study of textual features, to ways of reading. Peter Lamarque’s concept of narrative opacity is a clear example of this shift. According to the philosophy of literature, literature, like any other art (...) form, does not compel us to engage realistically with it. Against this trend, this paper argues for the distinction between two kinds of opacity, defending textual opacity as a necessary condition for literary opacity. In this sense, examples in literary criticism properly illustrate not a peripheral role of meaning in literary appreciation, but arbitrariness in interpretation, which involves semantic concerns. So the assumed interest in the specific ways in which literature embeds meaning in fictional narrative works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 312-333 [Access article in PDF] Consilient Literary Interpretation Marcus Nordlund I THIS IS AN EXCITING TIME in the history of human self-knowledge. Like the two souls in Plato's Symposium, the life sciences and the human sciences are slowly coming to terms with their painful divorce and are increasingly on speaking terms. Thanks to important developments across a broad range of academic disciplines (...) from biology and neuroscience to anthropology and psychology, we are starting to glean the possibility of a new conceptual integration that may have important consequences for our understanding of human nature. After hundreds of years of virtuoso variations on the theme of philosophical and scientific dualism, we have come some way towards bridging the gap between mind and matter, biology and culture, science and the arts.From the perspective of literary studies, two recent developments have been especially valuable. The previous decade saw a growing recognition among social scientists of the explanatory force of evolutionary theory, and of the ultimate bankruptcy of the nature-nurture opposition that forces biology and culture into different compartments. Since the social sciences have always supplied literary studies with food for thought, it would be strange if such developments did not reflect on literature, too. Equally important has been the increasing impatience among scholars in the humanities with the radical skepticism, antiscientism, and dogmatic agnosticism that turns both science and literature into mere self-validating narratives and sees no significant difference between descriptive and normative statements. Together, these theoretical shifts have slowly begun to pave the way for a new dialogue between those who study biology, psychology, and cultural artifacts like literature. Since the mid-1990s, a number of literary [End Page 312] scholars have taken the first steps towards merging evolutionary and cultural explanation in the study of literature. 1One striking defense of such a conceptual integration between science and literature was delivered a few years ago in Edward O. Wilson's Consilience. 2 According to Wilson, there is "only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides" (p. 138). While he concedes that the two cultures can and should be characterized by "radically different goals and methods," he also stresses that interpretation provides a "logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts" (p. 234).While we have good reason to be optimistic about the potential of this joint endeavor, it is nevertheless fraught with massive problems. The current track record in interdisciplinary literary studies is uneven, to say the least. Strange confusions about the nature and status of theory abound, and these often take the shape of spontaneous raids into foreign conceptual frameworks that are bound to baffle the practitioners of the host discipline. As Richard Levin importantly points out, 3 there are numerous reasons why current interdisciplinary literary theories tend to become self-validating. There are no negative tests; critics tend to choose theories on the basis of ideological preferences rather than the criterion of truth; and there is a widespread assumption that theories can simply be transformed willfully whenever they do not meet the requirements of the interpreter.Many of the problems Levin points to can, I think, be remedied by something as trivial as a change in attitude within the discipline of literature itself. For example, something has obviously gone seriously wrong when the automatic spouting of political ad hominem arguments and genetic fallacies has become second nature to so many critics. But there are other and more fundamental problems that seem intrinsic to the whole question of interdisciplinarity. One of these, according to Wilson, is that as we move forward in the hierarchy of sciences, from physics to biology to literature, we encounter a rapidly accelerating complexity: "It is far easier to go backward through the branching corridors than to go forward.... Biology is almost unimaginably more complex than physics, and the arts equivalently more complex than... (shrink)

The paper explores the relevance of irrecoverable authorial intentions to the interpretation of texts. It suggests that the ways in which different conventions of discourse take account of the existence of irrecoverable intentions (i.e. of the failure of texts perfectly to represent their authors' intentions) can guide us to a criterion for distinguishing 'literary' from 'non-literary' texts, or 'literary'(aesthetically motivated) from 'non-literary' readings of texts.

I discuss three theories regarding the interpretation of fictional literature: actual intentionalism (author's intentions constrain how their works are to be interpreted), hypothetical intentionalism (interpretations are justified as those most likely intended by a postulated author), and the value-maximizing theory (interpretations presenting the work in the most favourable light are to be preferred). I claim that actual intentionalism cannot account for the appropriateness or legitimacy of some interpretations, or alternatively that it must be weakened to the point that the (...) considerations raised by hypothetical intentionalists and value maximizers come into play. And I argue that hypothetical intentionalism either reduces to the value-maximizing theory, which provides a more accurate and clearer expression of the position than does hypothetical intentionalism, or it mistakenly attributes to hypothesized intentions the kind of force that attaches only to actual intentions. (shrink)

Taking a cue from the interpretive difficulties faced by Socrates and his interlocutors in Plato’s Theaetetus as they struggle to determine the meaning of Protagoras’ homo-mensura doctrine (HM), I argue that Protagoras, or early Protagoreans, used HM to speak on the relativity of literary criticism. For evidence I adduce an overlooked passage of the anonymous Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, which contains an ethical formulation of HM. This formulation of HM, compatible with the portrait of Protagoras from Theaetetus, explains the (...) concern for literary interpretation latent in two sections of the Certamen. From the evidence in the Certamen, we may infer that HM was directly related to Protagorean education in civic virtue, part of which included a study of how to read and listen to texts. (shrink)

The work is proven to have a unified and sustained rhetorical argument. It imitates the philosophical process that it attributes to Socrates.

By meshing psychology with literary analysis, this book inspires us to view the reading of fictional works as an emotional and seductive affair between reader and writer. Arguing that current teaching practices have contributed to the current decline in the study of literature, Jean-François Vernay's plea brings a refreshing perspective by seeking new directions and conceptual tools to highlight the value of literature. Interdisciplinary in focus and relevant to timely discussions of the vitality between emotion and literary studies, (...) particularly within the contexts of psychology, affect studies, and cognitive studies, this book will open up a space in which the formation of our emotions can be openly examined and discussed. Jean-François Vernay has published extensively in the field of Literary Studies both in French and in English. His books, Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch andA Brief Take on the Australian Novel, focus on Australian fiction. Carolyne Lee is a Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published four books, the latest being Our Very Own Adventure. (shrink)

This paper explores the intersections of literary theory and ancient philosophy, with a specific focus on how these disciplines enhance our understanding of sacred texts. It examines the historical development of classical Chinese literary criticism and its influence on Western thought, particularly through the lens of the early 20th century’s integration of Western literary concepts. This integration, often mediated through Japanese interpretations, provided a new framework for the "scientific study" of ancient Chinese texts, blending traditional Confucian interpretations (...) with Western analytical methods. The paper delves into how cognitive linguistics, especially the conceptual metaphor theory, aids in understanding philosophical views of the heart in ancient Chinese philosophy—as not just the seat of emotions but as a central governing entity analogous to political rulers. By examining this metaphor, the study highlights the profound implications of linguistic and literary frameworks in interpreting the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of ancient texts, offering new insights into their ethical and religious significance. (shrink)

The article deals with the determining role of the primary literary source on the Ukrainian theme in the creation of ballets. This made it possible to assert that at the junction of various arts, choreography and its special plastic form contribute to the creation of new avant-garde forms of art, thereby realizing the richest artistic potential of the direction. Based on this, it becomes clear that the relationship between literary and choreographic arts is close, because it affects the (...) enrichment of the ballet repertoire. Creating a choreographic work based on a literary background is one of the most important achievements of choreography.The artistic integrity of choreographic works forms the basis of the principle of art synthesis. The author of the article determined the important role of Ukrainian dance in creating a choreographic performance based on a literary source, because Ukrainian choreographic art is noted for its inexhaustible wealth of dance colors, emotional fervor, subtle folk humor and sincerity of performance, therefore creating a choreographic work based on literary works, especially on national themes, which is an auxiliary factor for activating the harmonious interrelationship of the specified time, space and transmitted events of the work with the means of stage and everyday dance vocabulary. The aim. The purpose and task of the article is to show the interpretation of literary works in the Ukrainian choreographic art of the 20th and early 21 centuries. Research methodology. A content-comparative method for comparing the works of researchers in different fields, the method of historicism - for researching a phenomenon within specific chronological limits, the method of generalization - for identifying the common and different points of view of scientists on the phenomenon under study. Research results: however, in the Ukrainian ballet theater of the late 50s of the 20th century, new aesthetic principles began to dominate, which were of great importance for the development of all musical and choreographic creativity. It is about rejecting prosaic plausibility as the only way to reproduce the truth of life on stage, restoring the hegemony of dance in the system of expressive means. In the ballet work of Ukrainian artists, the direction towards the heroization of the genre, the tendency towards the epic type of drama and the wide use of folklore becomes noticeable. Conclusion. In the process of working on the embodiment of a literary work or an image, the dramaturgy has the ability to change, develop, acquire specific features and details, the dramaturgy becomes alive, filled and exciting for the viewer. The ballet master’s solution to the embodiment of the literary source is embodied by the ballet dancers, who bring it to the audience with their art. The development and enrichment of choreographic art, the search for new forms, in this way, we observe in a creative union with adjacent muses, in interaction with other arts, where choreography does not dissolve in them, but while keeping its face, makes a fruitful contribution to the development of this union. The artistic integrity characteristic of the best choreographic works is based on the principle of synthesis of arts. Forms and means of dance-plastic action, principles of music-choreography dramaturgy, which allow to create works commensurate with the outstanding achievements of other arts, were formed in this experience. The key to the success of choreographic art is the mastery and development of this experience. (shrink)

Anchors and ghosts -- Making sense -- The anxiety of evidence -- The wheat and the chaff -- Sedation or seduction?.

INTRODUCTION The present volume is a study of the extant commentaries on a number of Plato's dialogues which were written by Neoplatonist philosophers of ...

Literary hermeneutics studies the problem of interpreting the meanings of an artistic text, considers it at the intersection of a number of philological fields and thus creates new criteria for philological/critical approach to an artistic text. The necessity that gave rise to literary hermeneutics as a field of philology was to reveal the depth of meanings of the artistic text. It also explains the aesthetic convergence and divergence between classical and modern literary texts, noting the points of (...) intersection of both. The modern artistic text does not arise on dry land, although it originates from the soul of the artist composing it, it is linked to tradition, it reflects a shared spiritual communion by visiting the past, specifically its past. It is clear that every poet who has traveled a certain creative path has his own definition of poetry. In forming this definition (the concept of poetry-!), the poet acts from his own experience and writes more with the intention handed down by tradition. Your own emotion can merge with, modify, or negate the thought of hundreds of years in an artistic text, and as a result, the layer of meaning in artistic texts expands to encompass the whole world. (shrink)

The article suggests that the best examples of textual work in the computational humanities are best understood as motivated by aesthetic concerns with the constraints placed on literature by computation’s cultural hegemony. To draw these concerns out, I adopt a middle-distant depth of field, examining the strange epistemology and unexpected aesthetic dimension of numerical culture’s encounters with literature. The middle-distant forms of reading I examine register problematically as literary scholarship not because they lack rigor or evidence but because their (...) unacknowledged object of study is the infrastructure of academic knowledge production. Work in the computational humanities is approaching a point at which the scale of analyzed data and data analysis washes out readings, the algorithms are achieving opaque complexity, and the analytical systems are producing purposive outputs. These problems cannot be addressed without attending to the aesthetics of data-driven cultural encounters, specifically the questions of how we produce readings/viewings and how they change our perceptions and characterize the interesting, critical theorization on method and meaning that make the best work in the computational humanities legitimately humanistic. I contribute a working example: a recommendation system for passages within the Shakespearean dramatic corpus, built using a large bibliographical dataset from JSTOR, a counting/ranking algorithm used at large scale. The system returns passages as intertexts for the passage a reader has selected. I explain how and why this system provides meaningful intertextual connections within the Shakespearean dramatic corpus by tracing the legible structural effects of disciplinary knowledge formation on the shape of this dataset. I close by suggesting how the computational and more traditional methods in the humanities might begin to stop debating past one another. (shrink)

Art, Beauty and Imitation in Plato's Philosophy -- Art and Imitation in Aristotle -- Horace, Pseudo-Longinus and the Aesthetics of Literature in Hellenism -- Plotinus, Neo-Platonic and Christian Conception of Beauty -- The Middle Ages and Dante Alighieri -- The Heritage of Kantian Philosophy in Romanticism -- Moritz: Beyond the Concept of Imitation -- Theory of Poetry of Early German Romanticism -- Hegel: Art as a Form of the Absolute Spirit -- Schopenhauer: Art as Disinterestedness and Knowledge of Reality -- (...) Nietzsche: Knowledge and Art -- Symbolism and Aestheticism -- Benedetto Croce: Art and intuition -- Linguistics and Criticism -- Antonio Gramsci: The Role of Intellectuals in Culture -- Structuralism -- Martin Heidegger: The Work of Art and Truth -- Hans-Georg Gadamer: Poetry and Interpretation -- Critical Theory: A New Attitude towards Art and Society -- Perspectives of Post-Structuralism -- The Practice of Deconstruction -- Contemporary Schools and Traditions in Literary and Critical Theory -- Postmodern and the New Character of the Literary Work. (shrink)

The persistence of some central instances of social injustice in European democracies governed by the rule of law; despite abundant resources for durably reducing them, is poorly understood. Understanding better the nature of law as constructive interpretation may strongly motivate future applications of the rule of law to alleviating substantially the social injustice of unnecessary yet continuing destitution among many persons, particularly in affluent and resourceful Paris. However, recent critical examinations of the nature of law as constructive interpretation (...) have uncovered a crucial problem with this otherwise cogent account. Here, I show how some eco-ethical reflection on the nature of aesthetic interpretation may suggest a way for resolving this problem with the nature of jurisprudential interpretation. If correct, a further developed version of this analysis may re-open constructively interpretive ways towards more socially effective means for applying the rule of law to help in the elimination of the persistent social injustice of widespread impoverishment in Paris and in other similarly governed major world cities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary KnowledgeWilliam FleschMeaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge, by G. L. Hagberg; xi & 178 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $27.50.The idea of studying Henry James and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein together is attractive, although there is very little stylistic similarity between them. Wittgenstein writes like a novelist, James like a philosopher. Wittgenstein (...) is intensely interested in the real language of real people; most of James’s dialogues bristle with a peculiarly Jamesian stiltedness. But both writers focus on the exquisite, extensive subtleties of language and of linguistic interaction, subtleties that tend to make uselessly crude such notional entities as facts, meanings, or ideas, and so of an epistemology based on such entities. The extremely fine grain of James’s analyses of his characters and of their analyses of each other already commits him philosophically to agreeing with Wittgenstein’s central insight that “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life”: to James’s characters life consists in interpretation of each other’s language. Those characters have the deepest lives who come to the greatest subtlety in their investigations of what determines the deeply overdetermined linguistic moves made by other minds.Hagberg’s book is disappointing, however. The exposition of Wittgenstein is unexceptionable but hardly novel, and as for James, Hagberg has confined himself to four stories, considerable to be sure, but hardly the novels. Hagberg gives creditable readings of these stories, especially “The Lesson of the Master” and “The Figure in the Carpet.” But he treats James’s stories more as demonstrations of his philosophical point—that there is an analogy between language games and works of art, also an analogy between our attitude towards a person and our attitude towards a work of art—than as works of art themselves. This would be fine if he didn’t keep asserting that they are examples of what they address: perhaps they are, but Hagberg makes them out primarily as didactic. Thus in “Figure” he finds a clear and direct argument that one ought not look for some propositional content as the point or secret of a work of art and thus a fortiori of a story like the one under consideration. [End Page 373] Hagberg is right, of course, but he reduces the story to a moral in just the way he claims it warns us to avoid.In his treatment of “Lesson,” he writes with real insight about the ambiguities of the master’s motivation in that story, and argues convincingly that the motivation may be opaque to the master himself, but then retreats from the insight thus won by treating ambiguity itself rather literal-mindedly, as a sort of resultant of several unambiguous vectors. Although the comparison of ambiguity to seeing aspects is fascinating, Hagberg’s analysis would be inevitably enriched by treating The Golden Bowl, where Adam Verver remains essentially ambiguous. Hagberg’s readings falter because his sense of language-games is too flat: he doesn’t take into account (although he claims to) their genuine variety. For Hagberg, unlike for Wittgenstein, games always have well-defined moves, and so ambiguity becomes a move. But what if it’s ambiguous whether it’s a move or not?Perhaps Hagberg’s account of “The Tree of Knowledge” is least in the spirit of Wittgenstein. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes, “I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking” (Part II, section xi). But Hagberg, in a taxonomy of kinds of knowing, takes it for granted that I can know what I am thinking (pp. 153, 169): again, this is a way of reducing ambiguity to a question of the intent of a “move,” and not grappling with its fundamental elusiveness.Meaning and Interpretation is a learned and helpfully provocative book, often written with great verve, but its value is more in the questions that it broaches than in the answers it offers. Raising questions is the proper Wittgensteinian and Jamesian activity: the book demonstrates by its own examples that offering definite answers may neutralize the power of the questions.William FleschBrandeis UniversityCopyright... (shrink)