How should we think about interpreting literature?

A text's meaning depends solely on the reader's experience.

Question: How should we think about interpreting literature?
Position‹2 of 4›: Reader-Response Criticism
Argument‹2 of 2: A text's meaning depends solely on the reader's experience.

Subjective reader-response critics argue that a reader's beliefs about and experience of a text determines meaning.

The argument

According to subjective reader-response criticism, the reader's reaction to a text determines its meaning. Although the text holds important themes of its own, each reader will arrive at slightly different interpretations of these themes because of their unique identities and experiences. What a scene means is not settled by the words alone; it is settled by what those words meet in the person reading them, and no two readers bring the same history to the page. A common critique of subjective criticism is its "denial" of objective meaning. In this framework, critics argue, no one can make claims about a work's ultimate meaning, and no reading can be shown to be wrong. The school's major figures divide over how far to accept that charge. Norman Holland embraced this, arguing that all interpretations are subjective because they lie in the reader. Stanley Fish makes a similar argument but relocates meaning one step outward, claiming that meaning resides in the reader's "interpretative community," not the reader alone — the shared conventions of a group of readers, which explain why interpretations converge without the text having dictated them. David Bleich, the founder of subjective criticism, goes further in answering the objection. He argues that readers can still arrive at an agreement concerning a text's objective meaning. They can discern the text's meaning by comparing interpretations with others in the reading community. Agreement, on this account, is something readers produce together rather than something they find waiting in the text, which is how the approach can accommodate shared readings without abandoning its starting point. The common thread is the location of meaning. Meaning is not treated as a property the text possesses independently of being read; it comes into existence in the encounter between text and reader. Because a text's meaning depends on the reader's experience, reader-response criticism is the right way to approach interpretation.

Premises

[P1]In reader-response criticism, the reader's own reaction to a text determines its meaning. [P2] Although a text holds its own themes, each reader interprets them differently because of their unique identity and experiences. [P3] Critics like Norman Holland and Stanley Fish locate meaning in the reader or their interpretive community rather than the text alone. [C] Therefore, because a text's meaning depends solely on the reader's experience, reader-response criticism is the right approach.

Counter-arguments

Taken literally, 'meaning depends solely on the reader' proves too much: if the text contributes nothing, then no interpretation could ever be mistaken, no two readers could genuinely disagree — they would simply be describing different private objects — and teaching or arguing about literature would be pointless. Yet we routinely judge some readings as misreadings; one cannot plausibly read Moby-Dick as a manual on whaling law, which shows the text itself constrains the range of admissible meanings. The argument's own sources concede as much: Fish relocates meaning to the 'interpretive community' rather than the solitary reader, and Bleich holds that readers can reach agreement about a text's objective meaning by comparison — both of which qualify the very word 'solely'. A more defensible reader-response view is that meaning arises in the interaction between text and reader; the strong claim that the reader alone determines it collapses the distinction between interpretation and invention.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] If the reader alone determined meaning, no reading could be wrong and no genuine disagreement about a text would be possible, contrary to ordinary interpretive practice. [Rejecting P3] The argument's own authorities, Fish and Bleich, locate meaning in an interpretive community or in achievable agreement, qualifying the claim that meaning resides 'solely' in the reader.

Proponents cited

Norman Holland
“We theorists of literature used to think that a given story or poem evoked some "correct" or at least widely shared response. When, however, I began (at Buffalo's Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts) to test this idea, I rather ruefully found a much subtler and a more complex process at work. Each person who reads a story, poem, or even a single word construes it differently.”
William Golding
“There have been so many interpretations of the story that I'm not going to choose between them. Make your own choice. They contradict each other, the various choices. The only choice that really matters, the only interpretation of the story, if you want one, is your own. Not your teacher's, not your professor's, not mine, not a critic's, not some authority's. The only thing that matters is, first, the experience of being in the story, moving through it. Then any interpretation you like. If it's yours, then that's the right one, because what's in a book is not what an author thought he put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.”
Stanley Fish
“Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning what is there, but if the example of my students can be generalized, it is a matter of knowing how to produce what can thereafter be said to be there. Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.”