So I was reading Hirsch in Keesey's Contexts for Criticism, and found his idea of textual meaning every insightful, I liked this quote,
One of the consequences arising from the view that a text is a piece of language - a purely public object - is the impossibility of defining in principle the nature of a correct interpretation. (19)
Now I see what the genetic theorists were looking to uncover in a sense. I mean text=language, right, which makes language a living thing in the way Eagleton was talking about tradion being alive. I mean its always evolving. So to read a work and really understand it, you must understand the language of the author. That could inclde the culture, ideals, and languge of the authors time. And from this it, language/text, will continually evolve. Which would make language/text a living thing. So you would have to have a nice firm grip on the text first to really be able to understand what it is saying. In a way thats real nice, but also couldn't it be said that depending on the reading you could either gain or lose something. It's like in class last night when there was mention of translation. couldn't you lose or gain depending on how well the translation is/was. I mean reguardless of how much you know about the author, if and when you go to read the work, you may or may not get the point depending upon the quality of the translation. Maybe, maybe not.
Comments (3)
I may be beating a dead horse because I've repeated this over and over and over and over and over and over, but without an irrefutable first-hand testimony from the author confirming the meaning of a text, any other interpretation is simply an opinion. Maybe a really good one, but still just an opinion.
Posted by Dave Moio | February 6, 2007 11:08 PM
Posted on February 6, 2007 23:08
Dave, that's true, but Hirsch's point is that some opinions are more defensible than others, and part of the task of the critic is to assess the evidence in favor of different interpretations. Rather than choosing the interpretation that supports your pet ideology, Hirsch argues that we should choose the interpretation that is closest to what the author most likely intended. And while we don't always know much about the author, we typically do know other things the author has written, other things that were written by different authors around the same time period, what artists in different media were doing around the same time, etc.
Identifying a particular claim as an opinion is just the start of the intellectual work one has to do in lit crit. And some of that work involves gathering facts about the context in which a work originally appeared. (That's far from the only work to be done in lit crit, but it's the approach we're focusing on this week.)
Posted by Dennis G. Jerz
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February 7, 2007 4:09 AM
Posted on February 7, 2007 04:09
I'm going to admit up front that I had no idea what this article was talking about at first. Now, reading your entry and the comment left by Dr. Jerz, I'm thinking I'm starting to get it a bit. The thought that Hirsch was trying to say that language/text evolves really opens up a whole new set of possiblilities. It helps me to see that the way that we may think an author intended something to be has a completely different meaning now than it did then.
Another thought that Dr. Jerz brought into my head was that what if one just used authorial intent as a starting place for another type of criticism. Isn't it possible to bring more than one type of criticism into a paper about a work? I would think that this would help to understand the work even better.
Posted by Tiffany | February 7, 2007 10:50 PM
Posted on February 7, 2007 22:50