literary interpretation

5 responses so far ↓

•   zzzzz // 16 September 2008 at 7.54 pm

  I really liked the way Fish tried to account for the reader and the reader’s experiences through an “Interpretive Community.” To me, this really hits a lot of the issues with interpretation that lie outside of the individual experiences of the reader, for many readers may come to very similar conclusions regardless of their different paths of life. These interpretive communities, then, color not unconsciously color the way people read, but the way that they (and I feel slightly odd for using this word) extract meaning from the literature they come into contact with. In a way I see a great parallel between this idea of interpretive communities and the historical contexts that Jauss speaks of, for it seems that every historical era had at least one critical method (and thus method of reading) at the forefront of literary study. I agree with this more broad-based view of literary interpretation, for accounting for each reader as a completely distinct beacon of personal meaning often seems… too specific in a way. Yes, each person brings his or her own experiences into reading, but it is definitely valid to say that in the grand scheme of things, much more can be learned if we look at the community–social, economic, or academic— that he or she is a part of.

•   sfbull5 // 16 September 2008 at 9.57 pm

  The one part of Fish’s essay I want to comment on is a line on his second to last page. He says, “The ability to interpret is not acquired; it is constitutive of being human. What is acquired are the ways of interpreting and those same ways can also be forgotten or supplanted, or complicated or dropped from favor.” I began to wonder whether, accepting for the time being the ability to interpret as innately “human,” whether the desire to interpret is also innately human or whether that is learned. I would apply this question not only to literature but also to other aspects of life — politics, casual everyday interactions, etc. Fish raises this question in another context, but who controls humans’ desire to interpret (literature, in this case) — is it the individual doing the interpreting, the author, or some higher influence? It seems like Fish attributes the reader more interpretive power than readers are often given (he talks about how the “reader’s activities are…ignored and devalued”), although I’m not entirely sure which side of the argument he would fall on.

•   sparkling_bears47 // 17 September 2008 at 12.08 am

  ok, I have to say, Fish’s essay has, for me, been the most interesting piece of literary critique we’ve read so far. A lot of what he said resonated with me and I was really impressed with how he took apart both the formalist analysis and the weaker parts of his own arguments.

  Like sfbull5 above me, I was really intrigued by Fish’s arguments on writing communities. His reasoning for individual and group readings made a lot of sense. This isn’t a question of literary studies so much as for sociology, but it would be really interesting to see how those writing communities fall across socio-economic boundaries. Are certain readings more common in certain situations? I’m pretty sure we can more or less say yes, but what about the readings the defy your expectations?

  I’d also like to point to a line from Fish about unsolvable readings where he argues that “[unsolvable readings] are not meant to be solved but to be experienced (they signify), and that consequently any procedure that attempts to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail” (149). His argument is that the reader’s search for a meaning is what’s important, not the end product, and that’s new.

•   sprinkles // 17 September 2008 at 12.55 am

  I am in agreement with zzzzzz that Fish and Jauss’s arguments were similar. It was obvious that they both believe that readers bring a set of expectations to a reading, which have been shaped by what they “learned” a certain genre contains. In other words, they believe that readers have assumptions about current readings based upon previous experiences with similar readings. I tend to agree with this statement because, as I read I find myself consistently creting predictions, consciously and subconsciously, about what will happen.

  One difference that I noted between Jauss and Fish was that Jauss seemed to believe that readers have a preexisting assumptions about their readings, whereas Fish believed that readers continually change their assumptions while reading.

  I found it interesting that both writers classified writing as a framework to steer readers towards their intended assumptions. I think that this may give writers too much credit because I don’t think that writers are able to predict reader interpretation.

•   david // 17 September 2008 at 3.50 am

  I’m a little blurry eyed, so please stick with me patiently as I try to come to terms with Fish’s claims. Reading (or as Fish calls it, “making sense”) is described as a dialectical process of synthesis between two incomplete entities, intention and understanding. But it seems to me (and I guess to Fish later on as well) that such an anti-formalist reading of the text in turn creates a formalist reading of a reading, if that makes sense. Fish attributes a presupposed structure not to the utterance but to the process of thought, finding meaning in the act of expression and interpretation. Fish (I love this guy’s name; isn’t it awesome to type/read/say aloud?) gathers that all problems within the text form the crux to a reader’s struggle of becoming (a becoming that stems from interpretation), and from there Fish finds resolution even if it’s supposedly open ended. Attributing significance to the unanswerable, however, seems counter to his theory of the text. For example, shouldn’t criticism therefore have such bottomless holes buried within its own analysis? In his final embrace of ambiguity (and falling short of his own wonderful insight IMHO), Fish artificially recreates a process (”making sense”) that provides the audience no such necessary challenges. Even though he acknowledges problems within the task of making sense, Fish has already worked them out for us, and by that I mean driving out all the mystery of interpretation in the attempt to articulate its mystery. In Fish’s hands, criticism becomes representational interpretation, a shadow of the chaotic world as it constantly reshapes itself in reaction to something else (in this case a poem). Isn’t such a reading, in which meaning is found rather than made and in which interpretation is implicitly (although not explicitly) treated as secondary, formalist?

  Anyway, Fish sort of said this himself. Or at least that’s how I interpreted it anyway.

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