The Limits of Interpretation

The Limits of Interpretation PDF Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253208699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Presents four theories describing the limits of literary interpretation, challenging "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation" that diminishes the meaning and the basis of communication. -- Back cover.

The Limits of Interpretation

The Limits of Interpretation PDF Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253208699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Presents four theories describing the limits of literary interpretation, challenging "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation" that diminishes the meaning and the basis of communication. -- Back cover.

The Limits of Interpretation

The Limits of Interpretation PDF Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In this new collection of essays, Eco focuses on what he calls the limits of interpretation, or, as he once noted in another context, ""the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation"". Readers of Eco's other work will find here all the ingredients with which they have become familiar--vast learning, an agile and exciting mind, good humor and a brilliance of insight.

Interpretation and Overinterpretation

Interpretation and Overinterpretation PDF Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521425544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book brings together some of the most distinguished figures currently at work in philosophy, literary theory and criticism to debate the limits of interpretation.

Serendipities

Serendipities PDF Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156007511
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
See:

Limits to Interpretation

Limits to Interpretation PDF Author: Vladimir E. Alexandrov
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299195403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Advocates a broad revision of the academic study of literature, proposing an adaptive, text-specific approach and using Anna Karenina to illustrate this method.

Purposive Interpretation in Law

Purposive Interpretation in Law PDF Author: Aharon Barak
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400841267
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This book presents a comprehensive theory of legal interpretation, by a leading judge and legal theorist. Currently, legal philosophers and jurists apply different theories of interpretation to constitutions, statutes, rules, wills, and contracts. Aharon Barak argues that an alternative approach--purposive interpretation--allows jurists and scholars to approach all legal texts in a similar manner while remaining sensitive to the important differences. Moreover, regardless of whether purposive interpretation amounts to a unifying theory, it would still be superior to other methods of interpretation in tackling each kind of text separately. Barak explains purposive interpretation as follows: All legal interpretation must start by establishing a range of semantic meanings for a given text, from which the legal meaning is then drawn. In purposive interpretation, the text's "purpose" is the criterion for establishing which of the semantic meanings yields the legal meaning. Establishing the ultimate purpose--and thus the legal meaning--depends on the relationship between the subjective and objective purposes; that is, between the original intent of the text's author and the intent of a reasonable author and of the legal system at the time of interpretation. This is easy to establish when the subjective and objective purposes coincide. But when they don't, the relative weight given to each purpose depends on the nature of the text. For example, subjective purpose is given substantial weight in interpreting a will; objective purpose, in interpreting a constitution. Barak develops this theory with masterful scholarship and close attention to its practical application. Throughout, he contrasts his approach with that of textualists and neotextualists such as Antonin Scalia, pragmatists such as Richard Posner, and legal philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin. This book represents a profoundly important contribution to legal scholarship and a major alternative to interpretive approaches advanced by other leading figures in the judicial world.

The Limits of Critique

The Limits of Critique PDF Author: Rita Felski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629403X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.

Interpretation and Understanding

Interpretation and Understanding PDF Author: Marcelo Dascal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027295891
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 738

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Book Description
Our species has been hunting for meaning ever since we departed from our cousins in the evolutionary tree. We developed sophisticated forms of communication. Yet, as much as they can convey meaning and foster understanding, they can also hide meaning and prevent comprehension. Indeed, we can never be sure that a "yes" conveys assent or that a smile reveals pleasure. In order to ascertain what communicative behavior "means", we have to go through an elaborate cognitive process of interpretation. This book deals with how we achieve the daily miracle of understanding each other. Based on the author ’s contributions to pragmatics, the book articulates his perspective using the insights of linguistics, the philosophy of language and rhetoric, and confronting alternatives to it. Theory formation is shaped by application to fields of human activity – such as legal practice, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, the media, literature, aesthetics, ethics and politics – where interpretation and understanding are paramount. Using an accessible language, this is a book addressed to specialists as well as to anyone interested in interpreting understanding and understanding the potentialities and limits of interpretation.

Manners of Interpretation

Manners of Interpretation PDF Author: Miguel Tamen
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438421788
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Philosophy and literary theory have devoted a great deal of their analysis to the problem of the origin and modalities of argumentation, but there has been an almost total lack of interest in the question of its procedural limits. Manners of Interpretation is an essay on ways of ending interpretations in literary studies as well as on patterns of controversy and consensus in the humanities. Tamen examines two major families of indisputable arguments in post-Enlightenment literary criticism and addresses the question of how one recognizes the proper time to use a given argument, especially and specifically an indisputable argument. The former aim leads to a tentative history of the constitution of literary theory as a set of identifiable ways of using arguments. The latter, meanwhile, points to a theory of argument and controversy and to a contribution to the discussion of human activities that, in spite of not being teachable, are nevertheless learnable. Such a theory seems to be particularly relevant both to the study of the interpretive dimension of literary criticism as it is now practiced and also to the knowledge and description of an area of the humanities that has often been neglected.

The Limits of History

The Limits of History PDF Author: Constantin Fasolt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226239101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time. So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis—gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning—Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it, the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends. With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, The Limits of History demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present. A work of both intellectual history and historiography, it will prove invaluable to students of historical method, philosophy, political theory, and early modern European culture.