On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
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).
<snip>
I think Phil means the debate over authorial intentionality (and related topics):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intentionality
Though he might have meant other aspects of that debate.
Other articles that might help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism
I could go on...
Carcharoth