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In the philosophy of art, an interpretation is an explanation of the meaning of a work of art. [a] An aesthetic interpretation expresses a particular emotional or experiential understanding most often used in reference to a poem or piece of literature, and may also apply to a work of visual art or performance. [1]
Readers may approach reading a text from different starting points. A student assigned to interpret a poem for class comes at reading differently from someone on the beach reading a novel for escapist pleasure. "Interpretation" implies the conscious task of making sense out of a piece of writing that may not be clear at first glance or that may reward deeper reading even if it at first appears perfectly clear. The beach reader will probably not need to interpret what she or he reads, but the student will. Professor Louise Rosenblatt, a specialist in the study of the reading process, distinguished between two reading stances that occupy opposite ends of a spectrum. Aesthetic reading differs from efferent reading in that the former describes a reader coming to the text expecting to devote attention to the words themselves, to take pleasure in their sounds, images, connotations, etc. Efferent reading, on the other hand, describes someone, "reading for knowledge, for information, or for the conclusion to an argument, or maybe for directions as to action, as in a recipe..., reading for what [one is] going to carry away afterwards. I term this efferent reading."(L. Rosenblat) That is what efferent means, leading or conducting away from something, in this case information from a text. On this view, poems and stories do not offer the reader a message to carry away, but a pleasure in which to participate actively—aesthetically.
There are many different theories of interpretation. On the one hand, there may be innumerable interpretations for any given piece of art, any one of which may be considered valid. [2] However, it may also be claimed that there really is only one valid interpretation for any given piece of art. The aesthetic theory that says people may approach art with different but equally valid aims is called "pluralism." But the aim of some of interpretations is such that they claim to be true or false.
A "relativistic" kind of claim - between "All readings are equally good" and "Only one reading is correct" - holds that readings that tie together more details of the text and that gain approval of practiced readers are better than ones that do not. One kind of relativistic interpretation is called "formal," referring to the "form" or shape of patterns in the words of a text, especially a poem or song. Pointing to the rhymes at the ends of lines is an objective set of resemblances in a poem. A reader of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" cannot help but hear the repetition of "nevermore" as a formal element of Poe's poem.
In the early 20th Century the German philosopher Martin Heidegger explored questions of formal philosophical analysis verses personal interpretations of aesthetic experience, preferencing the direct subjective experience of a work of art as essential to an individual's aesthetic interpretation. [3]
A contemporary theory informed by awareness that an ever-expanding exposure to ideas made possible by the internet has changed both the act of creation, and the experience of perception, is known as Multi Factorial Apperception (MFA). This approach seeks to integrate a wide range of cultural variables to expand the contextual frame for viewing the creation, and perception, of aesthetic experience. Emphasis is on a dynamic mulit-layerd cultural framing of the act of creation at a particular moment in time, and admits that the meaning of a particular work will be in flux from that moment onward.[ citation needed ]
Some students of the reading process advocate that a reader should attempt to identify what the artist is trying to accomplish and interpret the art in terms of whether or not the artist has succeeded. Professor E. D. Hirsch wrote two books arguing that "the author's intention must be the ultimate determiner of meaning." (E. D. Hirsch) In this controversial view, there is a single correct interpretation consistent with the artist's intention for any given art work.
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste and, in a broad sense, incorporates the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgments of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics, Truth and Method.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy, often witnessed within Western canon along with some postmodernist theory.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. As necessary, hermeneutics may include the art of understanding and communication.
Wolfgang Iser was a German literary scholar.
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author, content, or form of the work.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work. Authorial intentionalism is the hermeneutical view that an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted. Opponents, who dispute its hermeneutical importance, have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies.
Reception theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes each particular reader's reception or interpretation in making meaning from a literary text. Reception theory is generally referred to as audience reception in the analysis of communications models. In literary studies, reception theory originated from the work of Hans-Robert Jauss in the late 1960s, and the most influential work was produced during the 1970s and early 1980s in Germany and the US, with some notable work done in other Western European countries. A form of reception theory has also been applied to the study of historiography.
"The Origin of the Work of Art" is an essay by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger drafted the text between 1935 and 1937, reworking it for publication in 1950 and again in 1960. Heidegger based his essay on a series of lectures he had previously delivered in Zurich and Frankfurt during the 1930s, first on the essence of the work of art and then on the question of the meaning of a "thing", marking the philosopher's first lectures on the notion of art.
Louise Michelle Rosenblatt was an American university professor. She is best known as a researcher into the teaching of literature.
Cybertext as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997 is a type of ergodic literature where the user traverses the text by doing nontrivial work.
Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher. Known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics, currently he is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.
The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. The circle is a metaphor for the procedure of transforming one's understanding of the part and the whole through iterative recontextualization.
Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions, or from more urban knowledge. It is "the 'throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language." There are two main types of foregrounding: parallelism and deviation. Parallelism can be described as unexpected regularity, while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. As the definition of foregrounding indicates, these are relative concepts. Something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textual surroundings, or wider such as an entire genre. Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language. It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, aid memorability, and/or invite interpretation.
A philosophical interpretation is the assignment of meanings to various concepts, symbols, or objects under consideration. Two broad types of interpretation can be distinguished: interpretations of physical objects, and interpretations of concepts.
Text world theory is a cognitive model of language processing which aims to explain how people construct meaning from language. Text world theory and schema theory seek to help people understand how we process language and create mental representations when we read or listen to something. This theory figuratively describes a piece of language as a "world" that the reader, hearer or interlocutor must "build" in their mind. Text world theory was first developed by Paul Werth in the 1980s, and has subsequently been used as in education as a method for pupils to engage with literature.
