Interpretive communities
Encyclopedia
Interpretive communities are a theoretical concept stemming from reader-response criticism
and invented by Stanley Fish
. They appeared in an article by Fish in 1976 entitled "Interpreting the Variorum". Fish's theory states that a text does not have meaning outside of a set of cultural assumptions regarding both what the characters mean and how they should be interpreted. This cultural context often includes authorial intent
, though it is not limited to it. Fish claims that we interpret texts because we are part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading a text. Furthermore, he claims, we cannot know whether someone is a part of our interpretive community or not, because any act of communication that we could engage in to tell whether we are part of the same interpretive community would have to be interpreted. That is, because we cannot escape our interpretive community, we can never really know its limits.
The idea has been very influential in reader-response criticism, though it has also been very controversial. It is often interpreted as a relativistic standpoint that "words have no meaning," though this is not what Fish means. Quite the opposite, Fish is a staunch advocate of his own readings of various texts. Rather, he means to point out that readings of a text are culturally constructed.
Reader-response criticism
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.Although literary theory has long paid some...
and invented by Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island...
. They appeared in an article by Fish in 1976 entitled "Interpreting the Variorum". Fish's theory states that a text does not have meaning outside of a set of cultural assumptions regarding both what the characters mean and how they should be interpreted. This cultural context often includes authorial intent
Authorial intentionality
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in his or her work.-Literary theory:In literary studies, the question of the validity of the methods of determining authorial intent has been debated since the early twentieth century. New Criticism,...
, though it is not limited to it. Fish claims that we interpret texts because we are part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading a text. Furthermore, he claims, we cannot know whether someone is a part of our interpretive community or not, because any act of communication that we could engage in to tell whether we are part of the same interpretive community would have to be interpreted. That is, because we cannot escape our interpretive community, we can never really know its limits.
The idea has been very influential in reader-response criticism, though it has also been very controversial. It is often interpreted as a relativistic standpoint that "words have no meaning," though this is not what Fish means. Quite the opposite, Fish is a staunch advocate of his own readings of various texts. Rather, he means to point out that readings of a text are culturally constructed.