Interpreting words, interpreting worlds

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 64, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 439-450

  Gibson, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049094035     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2006.00222.x     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. The work of Eileen John can be read as an implicit exception to this claim. Her work is marked by an interest in showing that of those works of fiction that put on offer a form of philosophical or conceptual knowledge, the moment of cognitive acquisition "is apt to occur primarily in our responses to the work - such works call for the reader or audience to be philosophers." Eileen John, "Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge: Philosophical Thought in Literary Context," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 331-348; quote from p. 331. I take it that locating the mechanism of cognitive acquisition in our responses to a work of fiction - rather than in some feature of the text itself - is tantamount to situating it in our interpretive activities. In a few respects, this article can be read as an attempt to explore how we might develop John's claim explicitly in terms of a theory of interpretation.
2. For some of the more influential recitals of the arguments canvassed here, see Jerome Stolnitz, "On the Cognitive Triviality of Art," The British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992): 191-200;
3. Gordon Graham, "Learning from Art," The British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995): 26-37;
4. T. J. Diffey, "What Can We Learn from Art?" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995): 204-211;
5. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
6. I developed a more sustained account of the problem than I offer here in "Between Truth and Triviality," The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 224-237
7. and in Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
8. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen's Truth, Fiction, and Literature is still the classic statement of this view.
9. For a clear and helpful overview of conventionalism and intentionalism in the theory of interpretation, see Robert Stecker, "Interpretation," in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London: Routledge, 1999).
10. For an excellent critical discussion of intentionalism, see Daniel O. Nathan, "Art, Meaning, and Artist's Meaning," in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (New York: Blackwell, 2006).
11. For a popular account of a version of hypothetical intentionalism that gives a central role to the notion of an audience in imputing intentions that are in turn determinative of literary meaning, see Jerrold Levinson's "Intentions and Interpretation: A Last Look," in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger (Temple University Press, 1992),
12. and his "Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and Replies," in Is There a Single Right Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz (Penn State University Press, 2002).
13. See Monroe Beardsley, "The Authority of the Text," in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Iseminger.
14. For the classic statement of this, see Colin Lyas, "Wittgensteinian Intentions," in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Iseminger.
15. Bernard Harrison, "Imagined Worlds and the Real One," in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 93.
16. The phrase "fictional world" is used here in a generic sense. There are many accounts of the nature of fictional worlds currently on offer, and I would like to keep my account broad enough so that it can sit comfortably with many of them. For a helpful discussion of various ways philosophers give sense to the idea of a fictional world, see Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 57-69.
17. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).
18. I offer as evidence of this claim that in two of the most prominent anthologies on interpretation in analytic aesthetics - Iseminger, ed., Intention and Interpretation and Krausz, ed., Is There a Single Right Interpretation? - none of the contributors concern themselves with the fictionality (what I call the world-generating capacity) of literary works and the implications this has for our interpretive encounters with them, with one exception. The exception is Alan Goldman's "The Sun Also Rises: Incompatible Interpretations," in Krausz, whose influence on my thinking here I take this opportunity to acknowledge.
19. Betrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (New York: Penguin, 1969), p. 275.
20. Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 326.
21. Cleanth Brooks, "Man, Time, and Eternity," reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of The Sound and the Fury (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 292.
22. John McDowell, Mind and World (Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 11.
23. See Lamarque and Olsen's discussion of a "fictive stance" in Truth, Fiction, and Literature, pp. 43-46.
24. Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from the Underground," in The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. David Magarshack (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 95.
25. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 22.
26. For discussions of this, see Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction.
27. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 27.
28. Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality and Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 1997).
29. See especially the chapter "Wittgenstein's Writerliness and Its Repressions" for a discussion of this idea.