We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Some have said, the reader’s response it not to the meaning, it is the meaning. What’s your view?
10 comments:
In my understanding there are three layers of meaning: 1) a priori, 2) authorial, 3) reader. These three must be in conversation with each other.
Authorial intent and reader response are ontologically connected (even if imperfectly) to universal meaning: we create and co-create (respectively) as imitations of the Creator. Readers can see a priori meaning the author did not intend. Many times authors return to their own work and see meaning that "just came out" that they did not consciously put in.
In other cases, there are multiple possible interpretations that fit within the framework of Meaning, or Truth. However, reader response is listed 3rd because it is obligated to work within the framework of authorial intent. A reader can certainly disagree with authorial intent (and be right!), but the reader must do so on the text's terms. Otherwise we too easily find ourselves making it up as we go along.
Per-Ole Tvarnø Lind said, If interpretation entirely rests on my experience of a given text, at least I might miss the point. Without knowing what intention the writer had in the first place, all sorts of problems show up. If a text signals that it's written in a certain genre, I have to take that in to consideration. It wouldn't make much sense to read history as fiction, if the writer clearly states it as history. Many books of the Old Testament are tricky, since we don't really know what genre they're written in. Some genres have been lost over the centuries, while new has arrived.
PO, Thanks. Good input. I think you make some valid points. If a reader's response is the only meaning - then meaning is sooo fluid that it becomes solely meaning for me and an exclusive meaning for me seems to be challenged by the other and the text in question. Even though intentionality, from its more psychological perspective, has been put into question, there still seems to be the text as a literary act that has personal and ethical considerations attached to its interpretation. Your helpful comment is instructive for spirituality too!
Michael Cousineau said Reducing meaning of a text to the meaning understood/created/imagined by a reader would make a mockery of concepts like libel, incitement to violence, hate speech, etc. and all laws based on them, not to mention written law in general.
Abigail Mallin said Well, given the way you've framed the question, I have to ask: how can there be meaning that is accessed apart from a readers response? In other words, there is no meaning without a reader and a reader's perspective is going to influence the way they interpret a text ,and thus they will derive a meaning, which may not be the same as a meaning another reader derives. I think this is fine. In fact, as a writer, I am happy when this happens. Readers discover things in a text that the writer often times doesn't even realise is there. The literary act is only complete with the reader, so the readers response/interpretation is essential to the meaning of the text. Furthermore, how do we want to differentiate "meaning" and "effect"? The effect a speech act or piece of writing has an an individual other, may not have been the intention of the speaker/author--and yet, we have to consider that effect as important when evaluating the significance of the text/speech act.
Thanks Michael, Valid points.
Thanks Abigail. What's your take on Michael and PO's comments? I think that in some sense you make good points, yet maybe a helpful notion is that reader meaning, while a feature of the literary act, cannot be the sole meaning and it has to undergo a hermeneutics of trust and suspicion that is related to some kind of referent. Otherwise, there would never be any possibility of critique or I meant that, not that or this most likely means that. Perhaps, another way of saying this is that meaning for me - reader - is important, but it cannot go it alone. Meaning "for me" is definitely valid and necessary, but I don't think meaning can't be reduced to this. Could we say there is a both/and configuration that is feasible? Meaning and meaning for me in dialogue. If not, I wonder if we're left with a monologue. "Effect" is a consideration that seems to indicate the relevance of the reader, which is valid to some degree when evaluating the impact of a text/speech act, but maybe there is also the phenomenon of application that flows out of meaning tethered in the text towards significance. I guess the genre would also be a factor.
Abigail Mallin said My take on PO and Michael's comments is that I more or less agree with them as far as they go, but both seem to lean toward the assumption that to say "a reader's response to a text is the meaning of the text" is the same as "the meaning of a text is only derived from a reader's response." I'm certainly not saying that, but I am saying that "the meaning of a text is NOT just the intention of the author." I suppose this is a both/and situation. What I would question is the assumption that the writer has a greater portion of authority on a text and a reader has a greater portion of responsibility (notice the words involved there: author-authority, response-responsibility). Instead I would argue that both have equal portions of authority and responsibility over a text and they must work--I suppose you could formulate it as dialogue, or layering, or dialectic, or palimpsest--together. The importance of this, to my mind, is the way it gets played out in real life conversation.
Abigail, Thanks for the clarification and further comment. I like the notions of authority and responsibility, but am not sure they are equal, unless we're willing to say interpretations are. True, the dialogue played out in real life conversation is essential - and maybe also connected to the process of deciding whether there might be better or worse interpretations and how authority and responsibility figure into this.
Renea,
Thanks. Good insights. I like the place you give for the reader, while affirming that he/she is tethered to the text in an overall dialogical fashion.
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