By Umberto Eco
The boundaries of interpretation--what a textual content can really be stated to mean--are of double curiosity to a semiotician whose personal novels' exciting complexity has provoked his readers into severe hypothesis as to their that means. Eco's illuminating and regularly hilarious dialogue levels from Dante to The identify of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, to Chomsky and Derrida, and bears all of the hallmarks of his inimitable own variety. 3 of the world's major figures in philosophy, literary thought and feedback absorb the problem of getting into debate with Eco at the query of interpretation. Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose each one upload a particular viewpoint in this contentious subject, contributing to a special trade of principles between a few of the best and most fun theorists within the box.
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Extra resources for Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Tanner Lectures in Human Values)
Sample text
Molly Bloom was in love with a tenor, Blaze Boylan; blaze can evoke the stake of Jeanne, but the hypothesis that Molly Bloom is an allegory of Jeanne d’Arc does not help to find something interesting in Ulysses (even though one day or another there will be a Joycean critic eager to try this key). Obviously, I am ready to change my mind if some other interpreter demonstrates that the Casanova connection can lead to some interesting interpretive path, but for the moment — as a model reader of my own novel — I feel entitled to say that such a hypothesis is scarcely rewarding.
Hartman is certainly not suggesting here that Wordsworth actually wished to produce these associations — such searching after the author’s intentions would not fit Hartman’s critical principles, H e simply wishes to say that it is legitimate for a sensitive reader to find what he finds in the text, because these associations are — at least potentially — evoked by the text, and because the poet might (perhaps unconsciously) have created some “harmonics” to the main theme. If it is not the author, let us say it is the language which has created this echo effect.
There is, however, a case in which it can be interesting to resort to the intention of the empirical author. When the author is The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 188 still living, and the critics have given their interpretations of his text, it can be interesting to ask the author how much and to what an extent he, as an empirical person, was aware of the manifold interpretations his text supported. At this point the response of the author must be used not to validate the interpretations of his text but to show the discrepancies between the author’s intention and the intention of the text.