| Annotation Metadata
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^"permissions":^"read":ӶӺ,"update":ӶӺ,"delete":ӶӺ,"admin":ӶӺ°,"user":^"id":6,"name":"Sarah Oberbichler"°,"id":"Ugq6cj3fp5","ranges":Ӷ^"start":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ6Ӻ","startOffset":19473,"end":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ6Ӻ","endOffset":22202°Ӻ,"quote":"What, however, if Susan had found a novel? Literary writings usually do not indicate their purpose. They may, of course, have some didactic effect, but that effect is, as a rule, considered beside the point in a discussion of literary interpretation. If the novel Susan finds, for instance, describes at some point someone walking in Paris, and Susan gathers from that description how one gets from the Pont Saint Michel to the Place Vendôme, that kind of learning would surely be deemed irrelevant to the interpretation, let alone evaluation, of the novel as a piece of literature. Yet, it is far less clear whether the fact that a novel suggests to the reader a way of dealing with a fiercely jealous spouse is to be deemed altogether irrelevant from a literary point of view. \nIs it the author’s didactic intention that matters? One can hardly doubt that Ibsen wrote Ghosts to teach the public a lesson. And while there may be little, if anything, to warrant the assumption that Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in order to warn young men against falling in love with married women, it would be difficult to maintain that, when writing Faust, he did not intend to impart some kind of wisdom. However, if we accept any such supposition—and it might seem quite reasonable to do so—it immediately raises a serious question: How on earth can a reader be sure that the wise conclusions he or she draws from the text do, in fact, constitute the wisdom the author intended to impart? That question, needless to say, must be raised not only with regard to wisdom but with regard to any deeper meaning or content that is presumed to lie beyond the conventional linguistic meaning of words and phrases. \nAny proficient speaker of the language in which a literary text is composed can be expected to understand the words and phrases the text contains.Ӷ7Ӻ But that kind of understanding (which, in principle, is equivalent to what Susan could bring to the found message) is not the kind literary scholars have in mind when they discuss whether or not a certain interpretation of a text is justifiable, plausible, or correct. I submit that whatever one might choose as the measure of justification, plausibility, or correctness when one is concerned with literary interpretation lies beyond the realm of linguistic competence (which is taken for granted as prerequisite) and involves relations one establishes between the conceptual structures called forth by the text and the conceptual network that constitutes one’s own experiential world. These relations, by definition, are subjective, in the sense that they cannot connect anything but the reader’s own conceptual structures with the reader’s own experiential world.","highlights":Ӷ^"jQuery3210096081495932957672":^°°,^"jQuery3210096081495932957672":^°°,^"jQuery3210096081495932957672":^°°,^"jQuery3210096081495932957672":^°°,^"jQuery3210096081495932957672":^°°Ӻ,"text":"","order":"mw-content-text","category":"Argumentation2","data_creacio":1571042860868°
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