Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 49,18 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780253208699
Presents four theories describing the limits of literary interpretation, challenging "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation" that diminishes the meaning and the basis of communication. -- Back cover.
Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 50,62 MB
Release : 1990
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN :
In this new collection of essays, Eco focuses on what he calls the limits of interpretation, or, as he once noted in another context, ""the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation"". Readers of Eco's other work will find here all the ingredients with which they have become familiar--vast learning, an agile and exciting mind, good humor and a brilliance of insight.
Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 30,60 MB
Release : 1992-03-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521425544
This book brings together some of the most distinguished figures currently at work in philosophy, literary theory and criticism to debate the limits of interpretation.
Author : Vladimir E. Alexandrov
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 18,2 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780299195403
Advocates a broad revision of the academic study of literature, proposing an adaptive, text-specific approach and using Anna Karenina to illustrate this method.
Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 32,66 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780156007511
See:
Author : Aharon Barak
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 31,86 MB
Release : 2011-10-16
Category : Law
ISBN : 1400841267
This book presents a comprehensive theory of legal interpretation, by a leading judge and legal theorist. Currently, legal philosophers and jurists apply different theories of interpretation to constitutions, statutes, rules, wills, and contracts. Aharon Barak argues that an alternative approach--purposive interpretation--allows jurists and scholars to approach all legal texts in a similar manner while remaining sensitive to the important differences. Moreover, regardless of whether purposive interpretation amounts to a unifying theory, it would still be superior to other methods of interpretation in tackling each kind of text separately. Barak explains purposive interpretation as follows: All legal interpretation must start by establishing a range of semantic meanings for a given text, from which the legal meaning is then drawn. In purposive interpretation, the text's "purpose" is the criterion for establishing which of the semantic meanings yields the legal meaning. Establishing the ultimate purpose--and thus the legal meaning--depends on the relationship between the subjective and objective purposes; that is, between the original intent of the text's author and the intent of a reasonable author and of the legal system at the time of interpretation. This is easy to establish when the subjective and objective purposes coincide. But when they don't, the relative weight given to each purpose depends on the nature of the text. For example, subjective purpose is given substantial weight in interpreting a will; objective purpose, in interpreting a constitution. Barak develops this theory with masterful scholarship and close attention to its practical application. Throughout, he contrasts his approach with that of textualists and neotextualists such as Antonin Scalia, pragmatists such as Richard Posner, and legal philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin. This book represents a profoundly important contribution to legal scholarship and a major alternative to interpretive approaches advanced by other leading figures in the judicial world.
Author : Miguel Tamen
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 42,62 MB
Release : 1993-08-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1438421788
Philosophy and literary theory have devoted a great deal of their analysis to the problem of the origin and modalities of argumentation, but there has been an almost total lack of interest in the question of its procedural limits. Manners of Interpretation is an essay on ways of ending interpretations in literary studies as well as on patterns of controversy and consensus in the humanities. Tamen examines two major families of indisputable arguments in post-Enlightenment literary criticism and addresses the question of how one recognizes the proper time to use a given argument, especially and specifically an indisputable argument. The former aim leads to a tentative history of the constitution of literary theory as a set of identifiable ways of using arguments. The latter, meanwhile, points to a theory of argument and controversy and to a contribution to the discussion of human activities that, in spite of not being teachable, are nevertheless learnable. Such a theory seems to be particularly relevant both to the study of the interpretive dimension of literary criticism as it is now practiced and also to the knowledge and description of an area of the humanities that has often been neglected.
Author : Rita Felski
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 50,81 MB
Release : 2015-10-20
Category : Education
ISBN : 022629403X
Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.
Author : Andreea Deciu Ritivoi
Publisher : Rodopi
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 10,65 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9401209324
This volume collects twenty-one original essays that discuss Michael Krausz’s distinctive and provocative contribution to the theory of interpretation. At the beginning of the book Krausz offers a synoptic review of his central claims, and he concludes with a substantive essay that replies to scholars from the United States, England, Germany, India, Japan, and Australia. Krausz’s philosophical work centers around a distinction that divides interpreters of cultural achievements into two groups. Singularists assume that for any object of interpretation only one single admissible interpretation can exist. Multiplists assume that for some objects of interpretation more than one interpretation is admissible. A central question concerns the ontological entanglements involved in interpretive activity. Domains of application include works of art and music, as well as literary, historical, legal and religious texts. Further topics include truth commissions, ethnocentrism and interpretations across cultures.
Author : James K. A. Smith
Publisher : Baker Books
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 17,39 MB
Release : 2012-04-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1441236325
In this provocative book James K. A. Smith, one of the most engaging Christian scholars of our day, offers an innovative approach to hermeneutics. The second edition of Smith's well-received debut book provides updated interaction with contemporary hermeneutical discussions and responds to criticisms.
