[WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus

[Thomas Dalton]

> At a number of points, this steps squarely into a decades-long debate
> in literary studies about the nature of reading and of interpretation.
> This is a debate that is still - perhaps permanently -unsettled.
> However the view Wikipedia is taking - that there is some core of
> knowledge that is "descriptive" as opposed to "interpretive" - is
> decades out of the realm of accepted. It's a discredited view.

Could you explain the nature of this debate? While there is certainly
a grey area between "descriptive" and "interpretive" I think the basic
plot elements of a novel aren't generally open to interpretation
(there will be exceptions for certain parts of certain novels, and
those can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis).

Also, it's important to note that novels were just an example - in
most cases, there isn't even a significant grey area, eg. you can use
someone's birth certificate as a reference for their date of birth,
you cannot use it as a reference for them having been born during the
Great Depression and thus having had a tough childhood. The former is
a simple fact, the latter is a (somewhat speculative) interpretation
of that fact.