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Fundamentals of
Literary Theory
Klaus W. Hempfer
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Fundamentals of Literary Theory
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Klaus W. Hempfer
Fundamentals of
Literary Theory
Translated from the German by Martin Bleisteiner
in collaboration with the author
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Preface
This volume is addressed to everyone who engages with literature as an
object of knowledge. Primarily, this category consists of students and
scholars of all literary disciplines from comparative literature to the individual national philologies, but the circle of intended readers also includes
those active in any field in which the proper handling of past and present
texts plays an essential role. This holds, for example, for linguistics with an
interest in phenomena beyond the sentence level; for theater studies,
where the relationship between dramatic text and performance is still of
crucial importance; for art studies, where the question is increasingly
being asked whether or not its artifacts ‘speak’ in a manner akin to texts
composed in natural languages; for the philosophy of language, where the
theories of fiction and interpretation constitute key areas of study; and, last
but not least, for historical scholarship. Even in disciplines such as theology and jurisprudence, where the status and function of texts are radically
different, the question arises as to the conditions of possibility for interpreting them in full accordance with their respective historical specificity.
Yet if the study of literature is to provide inter- and trans-disciplinary
impulses, it must itself possess a disciplinary core. In the following, I am
therefore concerned with fundamental questions of literary theory which
represent this nucleus and hence form the basis on which inter- and trans-­
disciplinary approaches can be developed in the first place.
It seems to be a matter of broad consensus that any engagement with
literature—whatever the epistemic impetus may be—makes it necessary to
clarify the preconditions of adequate ‘interpretation’. In Chap. 1, I
v
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vi
PREFACE
undertake such a clarification by formulating seven theses and five interpretative maxims.
Of similar importance for literary theory is the relationship between
literature and fiction. As I demonstrate in Chap. 2, while conceptualizations of ‘fiction(ality)’ originating from other disciplines cannot simply be
transferred to literary studies, it is nonetheless possible and necessary to
pick up crucial terminological differentiations developed in the neighboring fields.
Given that performance studies are now firmly established as an autonomous discipline chiefly concerned with the concrete mise-en-scène, it
falls to literary scholarship to examine the written dramatic text, whose
peculiarity lies in the fact that it must always already be read as intended to
be performed. Chapter 3 therefore investigates the question of how far a
more precise understanding of ‘performativity’ (as distinct from ‘performance’) can serve as a criterion of differentiation for certain groups
of texts.
Chapter 4, meanwhile, proposes a return to a more restricted conception of intertextuality which eschews the a priori equation of ‘text’ and
‘culture’ while making it possible to distinguish relations between individual texts from interdiscursive and intermedial ones, thereby enabling
the systematic differentiation of ‘intertextuality’ and ‘intermediality’.
Drawing a distinction between groups of texts by means of the concept
of ‘genre’ (Chap. 5) has been part and parcel of poetological reflection
since its very beginning and is thus an indispensable part of the scholarly
engagement with literary texts, notwithstanding the fact that numerous
attempts were made following Croce to dismiss ‘genres’ as normative
‘pseudo concepts’.
The utility of period concepts for literary studies is another contentious
issue. As I will show in Chap. 6, chronological organization is indispensable. Therefore, what is at stake is not the ‘if’ but rather the ‘how’ of
periodization: epochs of literary history cannot be derived from totalizing
periodizations of history tout court.
Pursuing the specific profile of literary studies does not mean that genuinely literary theory cannot or should not draw on insights garnered in
other academic disciplines. On the contrary: as my deliberations in this
volume show, the study of literature benefits greatly from concepts,
hypotheses, and theories developed in fields as diverse as linguistics, epistemology, cognitive psychology, analytical philosophy, and the philosophy
of language. However, this is not tantamount to a dissolution of literary
studies in generalized cultural studies whose ‘turns’ seem to follow in ever
quicker succession.
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PREFACE
vii
Of course, the study of literature is cultural scholarship, in the sense
that it deals with a cultural phenomenon—‘literature’—which is itself
based on separating a certain set of texts from the entirety of culturally
produced writings according to historically variable conditions and criteria. But this is not the same thing as the repeatedly proclaimed reorientations in the field of cultural studies, which not only have failed to bring
about the cultural turn, but have led to a multiplicity of ‘swerves’ that are
not only widely divergent, but often mutually exclusive. One example of
this is the ‘interpretative turn’: conceiving of culture in general as text, it
stands in marked opposition to the ‘performative turn’, which operates on
the thesis of culture as performance while confusing the latter with performativity. If the individual ‘cultural turns’ cannot be derived from one
another, then it follows that they cannot determine which ‘turn’ literary
theory is to follow. The exact opposite is the case: the question of which
insights produced by the reorientation(s) in cultural studies are applicable
to literary studies can only be answered from the vantage point of the
discipline’s specific theory design. It goes without saying that disciplinary
orders, too, can be subject to radical processes of transformation—but
instead of being brought about by mere ‘trend-hopping’, these processes
are driven by fundamental changes in epistemology and the philosophy of
science. Among the latter, I count the supersession of essentialist notions
of ‘reality’ by constructivist conceptions of varying radicality, as well as
Popper’s very early postulation of the theory-dependence of all scholarly
observation (1934), which, in the wake of Thomas S. Kuhn’s history of
science approach, was taken up again especially in the field of laboratory
studies.
It is against this backdrop that I seek to conceptualize the disciplinary
core of literature studies as an academic field of research engaging with a
variable group of texts based on historically variable criteria. In so doing,
I do not presuppose an a priori definition of ‘text’ and/or ‘literary text’;
rather, I begin by employing the term ‘text’ as “an intuitively accessible
concept in the sense of a sequence of sentences or other linguistic utterances that are considered to form a unit” (Horstmann 2003), before then
proceeding to construct this intuitive concept ‘performatively’ via six individual sub-theories.
My choice of this approach neither means that I want to restrict literary
theory to these six key aspects, nor that the theoretical fields in question
cannot be divided further. However, given that such a sub-categorization
would have far exceeded the scope of this volume, I have opted to confine
myself to general questions pertaining to, for instance, the usage of period
and genre concepts.
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viii
PREFACE
If I am here reformulating the key concerns of literary studies under
recourse to trans-disciplinary findings (as opposed to dissolving the discipline under the all-encompassing rubric of cultural studies), then the crucial desideratum is a systematic synthesis of theory and history, that is,
theoretical reflection must be tied to concrete historical conditions. To
that end, I combine my earlier research, which I have partly modified and
expanded, with completely new aspects, especially in the chapters on the
theory of fiction(ality) and periodization. Here, but also in the remaining
chapters, I clarify earlier positions or present a revised argument that
incorporates recent scholarship. The result of this approach is a strong
systematic interconnectedness between the individual chapters, which I
have tried to highlight with a substantial number of explicit cross references. In cases where I unreservedly maintain my earlier stance, I have
either integrated it into my argument or referred to the original place of
publication. In future discussions, it is my wish to be measured against the
positions taken here; moreover, I very much hope that a ‘charitable reader’
does not operate on the assumption that everything must be new in order
for anything to be new—I would consider this to be the exact opposite of
scholarship, namely magic.
From the moment this book appeared in the original German in 2018,
my publisher began exploring the possibility of an English edition—here,
too, the goal was to achieve a fruitful conjunction, a transnational and
transcultural synthesis of strands of scholarship that have far too often
remained unconnected. Striking the right balance between readability and
terminological faithfulness was a delicate task, especially given that a significant part of the cited German-language research had never been translated. An initial draft prepared by Steven Rendall proved instrumental in
getting the project off the ground. In its present form, the English translation is the product of a collaboration between Martin Bleisteiner and
myself. For the sake of brevity, quotations from the German are provided
in English only—if needed, the originals are readily available in the German
edition. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our own.
Berlin, Germany
Klaus W. Hempfer
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Contents
1 Interpretation 1
1.1The Inevitability of ‘Interpretation’ 1
1.2Literary Interpretation as ‘Knowing How’ 10
1.3Interpretation as Topical Argumentation and as Making
the Implicit Explicit 14
1.4Some Interpretive Maxims 24
1.4.1Maxim 1: Interpret Historically 24
1.4.2Maxim 2: Distinguish Between ‘Reception’ and
‘Interpretation’ 26
1.4.3Maxim 3: Grasp the Text in Its Entirety and Avoid
Nihilations 31
1.4.4Maxim 4: Begin by Relating the Properties of the
Text to Those of the Literary System, and Do Not
Prematurely Correlate Different Socio-cultural
Subsystems 33
1.4.5Maxim 5: Consider the Author and the Reader,
But Trust Only the Text 35
1.5Pertinent Works on the Theory of Interpretation 44
2 Fiction 47
2.1Fictivity Versus Fictionality 51
2.2Fictionality: Institution, Contract, or Convention? 54
2.3Signals of Fiction(ality) Versus Properties of Fiction(ality) 70
2.4Properties of Fiction(ality) 73
xi
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xii
Contents
2.4.1Reference and Existential Presupposition 73
2.4.1.1Reference Versus Meaning and Reference
Versus Predication 73
2.4.1.2Reference and Presupposition 76
2.4.1.3The Paradox of Fiction I: Reference
Without a Referent as a Property of
Fiction(ality), Or: The Constitution of
Fiction as a Violation of Presupposition 81
2.4.2Speech Acts Versus Speech Situations 86
2.4.2.1Speech Act Theory and Fiction(ality) 86
2.4.2.2The Emergence of Fictionality Out of Deixis 90
2.4.3The Paradox of Fiction II: ‘Believing That p, and
Knowing That Not-p’103
2.5The Relationship of Fiction(ality) and Literature115
2.6The Conceptual Status of Fiction(ality)121
2.7Pertinent Works on the Theory of Fiction134
3 Performance and Performativity137
3.1Necessary Distinctions138
3.1.1Conceptual Ambiguity: The Difference Between
Austin’s ‘Performativity’ and Chomsky’s
‘Performance’139
3.1.2Prototype (1) of the Performative: The Performative
Utterance144
3.1.3Prototype (2): The Theater Model and the
Relationship Between ‘Performativity’ and
‘Performance’149
3.1.4Proliferations (1): From Derrida to Paul de Man
and Culler155
3.1.5Proliferations (2): The Performative Constitution
of the Social and the ‘Performative’ Readings of
Austin160
3.2Performativity and Text166
3.3‘Functional’ Performativity?177
3.4Pertinent Works on Performance and Performativity179
4 Intertextuality181
4.1The Starting Point: From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kristeva’s
Intertextuality182
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Contents xiii
4.2Holistic Theory Claims and Particular Theory Design195
4.3The Case for a More Restricted Concept of Intertextuality:
Intertextuality Versus Systemic Reference205
4.4Some Differentiations213
4.5Systemic Reference and Interdiscursivity222
4.6Pertinent Works on the Theory of Intertextuality232
5 Genre235
5.1Terminology and Levels of Abstraction235
5.2The Problem of Ontology and the Epistemological Turn239
5.3‘Genres’ as ‘Discursive Conventions’ and the Fundamental
‘Genericity’ of Linguistic Utterances247
5.4The Heuristics of Genericity, Or: The Problem of the
Beginning253
5.4.1‘Name’ Versus ‘Thing’253
5.4.2Archetypes and Exemplary Authors/Texts258
5.4.3The Constructivist Approach262
5.5A Model of Generic Layers264
5.6Pertinent Works on Genre Theory279
6 Periods283
6.1The Inevitability of ‘Periodization’283
6.2The Epistemological Status of Period Concepts289
6.3‘Period’ Versus ‘Timespan’296
6.4Procedures and Criteria for the Construction of Period
Concepts304
6.4.1‘Particular’ Versus ‘Totalizing’ Periodizations and
the Problem of Phase Shifts304
6.4.2The Synchronization of the Diachronic and the False
Opposition Between Continuity and Rupture313
6.4.3Temporal Planes, Temporal Strata, Temporal Scales320
6.5Historical Self-Conceptions and Scholarly Period
Construction: The Criteria-Dependency of Periodization333
6.6Pertinent Works on Periodization339
Bibliography343
Index391
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CHAPTER 1
Interpretation
1.1 The Inevitability of ‘Interpretation’
The understanding of ‘interpretation’ I shall discuss first is certainly not
uppermost in the minds of literary theorists when they employ the term.
However, it reveals the widest possible scope of meaning that the concept
has acquired in the context of the ‘interpretation philosophy’ developed
above all by Lenk and Abel. As Abel explains in an early article, ‘interpretation’ appears in the compound Interpretationsphilosophie as
shorthand for the entirety and the fundamental character of those processes
through which we discriminate, identify, and re-identify a given thing as a
certain phenomenal Something, apply predicates and attributes, construct
correlations, classify into categories, and, through the world formed in this
way, have opinions, convictions, and even justified knowledge. (Abel 1988: 51)
‘Interpretation’ thus designates an epistemological habitus that conceives
of ‘reality’ not as in any sense objectively given, but rather as the product
of a process of interpretation. Abel puts this most succinctly in his book
Zeichen der Wirklichkeit published in 2004:
Talking about ‘signs of reality’ implies that under critical auspices, reality is
always only reality in signs and interpretations, and can never be absolute,
completely non-epistemic, wholly sign- and interpretation-free.
(Abel 2004: 15)
1
K. W. Hempfer, Fundamentals of Literary Theory,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47408-8_1
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K. W. HEMPFER
Both Lenk and Abel explicitly subsume the exegesis of texts under this
epistemic concept of interpretation:
The traditional interpretation of texts—that is, the understanding or exegesis of a given text (or, in a somewhat broader sense: of a certain configuration of signs)—then represents a particular instance of this general concept
of interpretation. (Lenk 1993: 252f.)
Although Lenk emphasizes that “an interpretation of texts […] that is
committed to the reading paradigm is informed in advance by a structured
and schematized form of the Something to be interpreted”, he holds that,
on a fundamental level, “the interpretation of texts is merely a special case
of interpretive-schematizing activities” (Lenk 1993: 253).
Abel, who essentially advances a similar argument, reduces Lenk’s1 six
levels of interpretation to three.2 The designation of the third level, to
which text interpretation belongs, as “appropriating readings” is both the
most likely to intrigue literary scholars3 and absolutely consistent with the
overarching framework of Abel’s model: after all, he is not concerned with
“the theory of interpretation (as it is to be found in literary studies), but
rather with the philosophy of the sign and of interpretation” (Abel 2004:
24), that is, with the basic epistemological question of our conception of
‘reality’. Abel’s key objective—like Lenk’s—is “to assume a position
See Lenk (1993: 255–264) and the accompanying diagram (ibid.: 259).
For a summary, see Abel (1988: 51f.) or Abel (1995: 14f.): “Heuristically, one can distinguish at least three levels and three aspects of the concept of interpretation, as it is used in
interpretationism and in the present book. So far as the levels are concerned, the original
productive construct-forming components that are manifested in the categorizing sign functions themselves, and that are already presupposed and employed in every organization of
experience, can be called ‘interpretation1’. In contrast, the paradigms of uniformity that have
been established by custom and have become habitual are referred to as ‘interpretation2’.
And the appropriating elements, e.g., the procedures of describing, theory-building, explaining, substantiating, or justifying, will hereafter be called ‘interpretation3’”.
3
Lenk (1993: 259) divides this level into three Interpretationsstufen (‘levels of interpretation’, IS), namely IS4: “Applying, appropriating, consciously formed categorizing interpretation (classification, subsumption, description, formation and ordering of categories;
deliberate concept-building)”; IS5: “explanatory, (in the narrower sense of the term) ‘understanding’, justifying, (theoretically) substantiating interpretation”; and IS6: “the epistemological (methodological) meta-interpretation of the interpretation-construct method”.
Literary interpretation would thus be located on levels 4 and 5.
1
2
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1 INTERPRETATION
3
beyond the dichotomy of passive mirroring and mere construction, and,
at the same time, beyond essentialism and relativism” (Abel 2004: 13).4
For the most part, Abel pursues this goal by critically engaging with
various epistemological positions within analytical philosophy. Notably
absent, however, appears to be the ‘dialectical constructivism’ pioneered
by Piaget based on his work in the field of developmental psychology.5
Starting with the publication of La construction du réel chez l’enfant
(1937), Piaget’s research provided an empirical basis for the assumption of
the ‘prestructuredness’ of any experience and underwent a comprehensive
epistemological and theoretical synthesis in his Logique et connaissance scientifique (1967).6 The common goal of both interpretation philosophy—
it is not for nothing that Lenk calls it ‘interpretation-construct philosophy’
(‘Interpretationskonstruktphilosophie’)—and Piaget’s dialectical constructivism7 is to overcome the epistemological dichotomy between essentialism and relativism. Whereas Abel resorts to the metaphor of the
revolving door,8 Piaget describes the process of construction as an “indissociable interaction between the contributions of the subject and those of
the object”.9 I am quite aware that interpretation(-construct) philosophy
would reject this rather traditionally formulated view of the subject-object
relation on the grounds that the ‘object’ is, as a matter of principle, pervaded by signs and interpretations. But neither is the underlying
conundrum solved by the charming image of the revolving door: as apposite as the metaphor may seem, it implicitly assumes an ‘in front’ and a
See also Lenk (1993: 264–272).
Lenk makes passing references to Piaget’s research on the gradual emergence of operational thinking in children (see Lenk 1993: 196, 199, 260).
6
On Piaget’s importance for the development of a ‘constructivist paradigm’, and the quite
heterogeneous epistemological assumptions of constructivism which have been diverging
since the 1960s, see the outstanding overview in Schaefer (2013: 19–60).
7
See Piaget (ed.) (1967: 118–132) (a concise summary of genetic epistemology) as well as
Piaget (1970).
8
See, for example, Abel (2004: 13): “The genitive in the phrase ‘sign of reality’ gestures
towards a fundamentally adualistic conception of the relation between reality and signs,
between reality and the human mind. It signals revolving-door-like relationships: Every individualized and specific reality is always already constituted by signs and conditioned by interpretations; every substantial and non-erroneous experience is always already an experience of
reality”.
9
Piaget (ed.) (1967: 1243f.). For Piaget, it is precisely this “interaction” that emblematizes the dialectical nature of his constructivism. Thus, the adjective ‘dialectic’ has nothing in
common with the Marxist conception of the term, except that something is being ‘mediated’. For further details, see Sect. 5.2, pp. 245–247.
4
5
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4
K. W. HEMPFER
‘behind’ (i.e., an inside and an outside) of such a door,10 which is the very
problem that the various kinds of constructivism seek to address.11 Since I
have no desire to dabble in philosophy, I cannot offer any general ‘solution’; I shall, however, draw on the example of the interpretation of literary texts in an attempt to outline my idea of how this problem could be
dealt with from the point of view of literary studies.
Against the background of the epistemological impasse sketched out
here, theoretical approaches that attempt to skirt the issue are anything
but persuasive. In the wake of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation
(1966), many scholars believed that they could come to grips with the
vexed problem of literary interpretation by abolishing it altogether; this
includes Wolfgang Iser in his Appellstruktur der Texte (1970), a seminal
study in the field of reception aesthetics which explicitly draws on Sontag’s
work.12 Yet if we examine the proffered arguments more closely, we find
that they are not directed against ‘interpretation’ as such, but rather
against various preconceived notions of what the practice involves, notions
which in turn associate ‘interpretation’ with specific procedures, goals,
questions, etc. Thus, Sontag mistakenly equates ‘interpretation’ with
‘content analysis’, and counters it with a pronounced focus on formal
aspects.13 Iser, meanwhile, inveighs against “the art of interpretation”, in
whose eyes the literary text is allegedly nothing more than “the illustration
of a meaning given to it in advance” (Iser 1970: 7)—a bold assertion that
is clearly at odds even with the epoch-making article to which Iser alludes,
namely Emil Staiger’s “Kunst der Interpretation” (1951). With a touch of
irony, one might instead say that Staiger’s interpretive goal—“to grasp
what grasps us” (Staiger 1951/2008: 31)—is precisely not geared toward
10
It is no coincidence that both Lenk and Abel distinguish between “heuristically” (Abel
1995: 14) different levels. For Lenk, the ‘deepest’ level (IS1) is constituted by “practically
immutable patterns of interpretation […] inherent in our biological predisposition, to which
we are bound, so to speak, and which we cannot give up, shed, or change”, patterns he consequently refers to as “primary or ur-interpretations” (Lenk 1993: 256). It would appear,
then, that something ineluctable is behind the ‘revolving door’ after all. In 1983, Ian
Hacking argued against fundamental interpretationism by drawing on examples from the
domain of physics such as Faraday’s lines of force, which could be ‘interpreted’ either as a
theoretical fiction or as a real phenomenon (Hacking 1983: 33–35).
11
On this, see again Schaefer (2013, esp. pp. 28–32), and Sect. 5.2, pp. 243–247,
where I discuss the matter in more detail.
12
See Iser (1970: 5). The following argument was first presented in Hempfer (2009: 21–24).
13
See Sontag (1966: 3–16), esp. p. 10: “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art”.
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1 INTERPRETATION
5
‘the meaning of literary texts’, but rather their emotional ‘appeal structure’, with the latter resulting from the “individual style of the poem”,
which is “not the form and not the content, not the idea and not the
motif. Instead, it is all this wrapped into one” (Staiger 1951/2008: 40).14
Not only do Sontag’s and Iser’s attempts to break away from ‘(the art
of) interpretation’ fail to convince on a theoretical level, but they themselves continued to interpret texts, films, and so on—all, of course, while
relying on other methodologies and ‘self-evident presuppositions’. When
Iser, for instance, wants to “name important formal conditions that engender indeterminacy in the text itself” (Iser 1970: 14, my italics), he has no
choice but to analyze the text and its structure, and hence to interpret it.
As the programmatic title for a 1979 article that also appeared as a
chapter in his Grundriß der Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft (1980),
Siegfried J. Schmidt chose a quotation from Hans Magnus Enzensberger:
“Fight the ugly vice of interpretation! Fight the even more ugly vice of the
correct interpretation!”15 Tom O. Kindt and Tilmann A. Köppe characterize this type of literary theory as follows:
Its object is not works of literature, but the actions that contribute to the
production, reception, communication, and processing of literary texts. And
its task consists not in the interpretive determination of the meaning of
texts, but rather in the empirical study of the social domains that are constituted by actions related to literature. (Kindt/Köppe (ed.) 2008: 191)
Kindt and Köppe’s summary is apt and allows us to cease concerning ourselves with a literary theory that believes it can marginalize what constitutes literature ‘empirically’ in the first place: a text that is materially
present in the form of a specific syntactic/semantic/pragmatic structure,
which in turn is the very prerequisite for the ‘production’ of what Schmidt
referred to as “L-Kommunikate”.16 It is precisely this question—namely,
how recipients arrive at their “reception results”, that is, how they
14
Staiger’s concept of interpretation is not nearly as ‘immanentist’ as is frequently claimed.
For a more accurate assessment, see the editors’ introductory remarks to the reprint of this
article in Kindt/Köppe (ed.) (2008: 27–29); see also Staiger’s article itself (ibid.: 30–52).
15
See Schmidt’s own statement in Schmidt (1979/2008: 194, n.2): “A large part of the
ideas presented here [i.e., in the article] appear in this book as Chap. 5, Sect. 5.4”.
16
Schmidt uses the term in reference to the individual “reception results” that “a recipient
assigns to a text” (Schmidt 1991: 324), results that are accessible only to ‘empirical’ analysis.
“L” stands for Literatur (‘literature’), “S” for Sprache (‘speech’ or ‘language’); see below.
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6
K. W. HEMPFER
understand and interpret texts—that Schmidt excludes from ‘empirical literary theory’. Against the background of a tradition of exegesis that goes
back thousands of years—one that may be problematic in a multitude of
ways, but proves historically the empirical fact of the inevitability of interpretation for understanding a text, no matter how it is constituted—this is
a daring move indeed. It also reveals a complete lack of knowledge of
recent developments in analytical philosophy, whose standards Schmidt
otherwise so emphatically invokes17: from Davidson’s Radical
Interpretation (first published in 1973) to Brandom’s Making It Explicit
(1994), the discipline has devised theories of meaning that (should)
explain why and how we do not understand linguistic utterances arbitrarily, and to what extent even ordinary communication is already based
on interpretation.18 Given that Schmidt relegates the issue around which a
significant part of the analytical philosophy of language revolves to the
‘black box’ of S- and L-Kommunikate that is impervious to further scrutiny, his ‘empirical literary theory’ offers no points of connection even to
theories of interpretation that are receptive to analytical precision.19
Interpretation is also explicitly rejected in a completely different theoretical context, namely that of deconstruction—yet here, in contrast to
‘empirical literary theory’, it is not simply to be abolished, but rather to be
replaced by the concept of the ‘reading’. Titles such as David E. Wellbery’s
“Interpretation versus Lesen” (1996) are paradigmatic of this approach. If
we take as our point of departure the meaning of the two lexemes in ordinary language, the relationship between ‘interpreting’ and ‘reading’ is not
one of opposition, but of presupposition: what we have not read or what
has not been communicated to us in another medium, we cannot interpret, even if in practice we do so all the time. (In which case we act as if we
17
See the introductory chapter, “Zur Begründung, Konzeption und Entwicklung einer
empirischen Theorie der Literatur (ETL)”, in Schmidt (1991: 17–35). How an empirical
conception of literary interpretation can be developed on an analytical basis is demonstrated
by Titzmann (2013).
18
See, for instance, the paradigmatic section in Brandom (1994: 510–513) entitled “Four
Linguistic Phenomena That Involve Interpretation”. On the narrower meaning of the concept of interpretation in Wittgenstein, see ibid.: 20–23 and 508–510.
19
In essence, Schmidt’s fundamental rejection of interpretation in general is based on the
rejection of one interpretation in particular (which is taken from Conrady 1974). While
Schmidt’s criticism of Conrady’s reading is largely valid, the insufficiency of one interpretation does not allow us to logically infer the impossibility of any interpretation (here, the
problem of induction rears its head; see Stegmüller 1975). For a recent discussion of the
fundamental inevitability of interpretation, see Hiebel (2017: 23–29).
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1 INTERPRETATION
7
had read something; the relation of presupposition is preserved, if only in
pretense.) In deconstructive theory, meanwhile, ‘reading’ acquires certain
connotations that render the concept ambiguous20 and turn it into a metaphor for a specific form of interpretation. Aleida Assmann draws the following distinction:
Interpretations produce exegeses that one can hold onto; readings are possible forms of experience one does or does not engage with. The fundamentalization of reading destroys the illusion of an objectively valid, ideal,
transferable interpretation. In this context, Geoffrey Hartman also speaks of
a ‘hermeneutics of undecidability’. (Assmann 1996: 19)21
These assertions invite contradiction. For one thing, ‘readings’, too, must
be specified in order to be communicated in scholarly works such as
Assmann’s own edited collection Texte und Lektüren (1996). More serious is the privatistic arbitrariness that is assigned to reading when it produces “forms of experience” that “one does or does not engage with”.
Obviously, everyone is free to read how they please, but if their ‘readings’
are to be fed into the discourse of an academic discipline, certain standards
exist that are not met by the notion that the “continuous […] re-­evaluation
of critical discourse” (Assmann 1996: 19) is merely a contingent process.22
Finally, it must be said that here, too, ‘interpretation’ is set up as a bogeyman that has precious little to do with the reality of literary scholarship.
There is a fundamental difference between approaches that start from the
assumption that texts have a semantic range that is, in principle, determinable (i.e., not arbitrary, but, as the case may be, very probably plural) and
those that claim to have found the one ‘true’ meaning. The latter is hubris,
which may exist in practice, but violates the basic principle of academic
research, viz., that each and every insight is open to refutation. Surprisingly,
it is precisely the post-structuralist theorists who, on the basis of their
theory of the text, have arrived at an unambivalent attribution of meaning
and thereby fallen into a performative self-contradiction: while they deny
the constitution of meaning on a primary level, they simultaneously ascribe
On the polysemy of the terms ‘reading’ and ‘interpretation’, see Winko (2002).
Assmann’s reference is to Hartman (1980: 41).
22
For an astute analysis of the “rampant fallacies of cultural studies and the humanities”,
see also Schlesier (2003), who notes: “We are dealing with a new, objectively weak and subjectively strong rehash of a kind of sophistry in which anyone is at liberty to interpret, or not
to interpret, as he or she wishes” (ibid.: 47).
20
21
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8
K. W. HEMPFER
meaning on the meta-level by reading any text as being about the procedures of textualization, as evidence of a productivité that must not be
reduced to a produit.23 If, for example, Ricardou’s reading turns Claude
Simon’s novel La Bataille de Pharsale into a “bataille de la phrase”,24 then
he not only assigns meaning, but at the same time radically restricts the
text’s semantic potential.25 Post-structural readings are thus ‘work-­
immanent’ interpretations, and this holds true not only for European, and
especially French, post-structuralism, but for Paul de Man and the
American version of deconstruction as well.26 What distinguishes these
schools of thought from the older immanentism (i.e., from the New
Criticism and what is referred to as Werkimmanenz in German academic
discourse) is not the replacement of ‘interpretation’ by ‘reading’, but
rather the different questions that are addressed to the text: instead of asking about unity, harmony, and coherence, they emphasize discrepancies
and contrary forces; instead of closure, openness; instead of the human
condition, the materiality of the textual, etc. On the one hand, this mindset enabled new approaches beyond deconstructionist orthodoxy, which
were not based on the supersession of ‘interpretation’ by ‘reading’, but
rather on the integration of innovative research questions into a systematic
concept of interpretation.27 On the other hand, it also produced, through
the connotative loading of ‘reading’ as methodologically ‘liberal’ and of
‘interpretation’ as ‘authoritarian’—paradigmatic of this tendency is once
again Assmann 1996, following Hartman 1980—a reduction of
23
For a detailed discussion of Kristeva’s terminology as well as post-structural text theory
and the accompanying conception of reading, see Hempfer (1976: 13–65).
24
This is the title of the chapter from Ricardou (1971: 118–158) in which he interprets
Simon’s novel.
25
For a fundamentally different interpretation of Simon’s novel that nonetheless makes
allowance for the thematization of procedures of textualization and the materiality of the
text, see Hempfer (1976: 130–168).
26
On the immanentism of Paul de Man’s conception of reading, see Spoerhase (2007: 83f.).
27
I myself have sought to re-think the concept of deconstruction “non-deconstructively”
(Hempfer 1989). On intertextuality, see Chap. 4.
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1 INTERPRETATION
9
rationality that allowed statements about literary texts to slip into the arbitrariness of individual associations.28
Contrary to these positions, Andreas Kablitz based his “theory of literature” on literary scholars’ “ways of dealing with the individual literary
text”, arguing that their practices involved “implicit theoretical assumptions regarding the specific characteristics of literature”, which, as Kablitz
put it, “prove to be considerably more persistent and in some respects far
more pertinent for dealing with the literary text than many of the paradigms that are explicitly grounded in theory” (Kablitz 2013: 12). This
‘praxeological turn’29 in literary theory seems to me productive, but it
does not render obsolete the question of how we can distinguish between
‘good’ and ‘not so good’ interpretive practices.30 My first thesis therefore is:
Thesis 1 Interpretation is fundamentally inevitable. Crucially, however, a
distinction can be drawn between ‘good’ and ‘less good’ interpretations.
In what follows, I discuss the problem of interpretation only with
regard to literary texts. Naturally, the question of how to distinguish a
‘good’ interpretation from a ‘less good’ one is posed differently in literary
studies than it is in theology or jurisprudence, for example, insofar as neither divine revelation nor legislative intent can be appealed to as a
28
Vinken (2009) is paradigmatic of this tendency (for a critical perspective, see Hempfer
2012). Following a brilliant pastiche of deconstructive interpretive procedures, Klaus Weimar
notes that it is “an active insult to almost any audience when, by presenting it with an interpretation like mine [referring to his pastiche], one ascribes to it such low standards of plausibility” (Weimar 2005: 135). Weimar does not explicitly designate his persiflage as
‘deconstructivist’, but its imitative character is unmistakable. For a similarly critical but
explicit position regarding deconstructive interpretive practices, see Schlesier (2003: 42): “If
Derrida, for instance, instead of following in Heidegger’s footsteps by deliriously burrowing
into individual words and concepts, were to go to the trouble of analyzing the syntax of a
text, his intellectual edifice would collapse like a house of cards”. Schlesier is here referring
to Bollack’s criticism of Derrida’s alleged ignorance of Greek syntactic procedures (Bollack
2000: 82). More recently, see Descher (2017: 45–104).
29
On the ‘praxeological turn’ in other academic disciplines, see Schatzki et al. (ed.) (2001)
and Volbers (2011); in literary studies in particular, Martus/Spoerhase (2009) and
Martus (2015).
30
I deliberately do not use the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, let alone ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the
sense of logical truth values—such designations cannot be assigned to interpretations, but at
most to individual sentences. Why this is so will be explained in the following.
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K. W. HEMPFER
normative authority.31 The fact that a theory of literary interpretation
must nevertheless draw on the work of neighboring disciplines—above all,
hermeneutics and the philosophy of language—will become evident over
the further course of this chapter.
1.2 Literary Interpretation as ‘Knowing How’
In my opinion, literary interpretation is based on a specific form of rationality that can be made explicit through a certain type of knowledge, insofar as a ‘knowing how’ or ‘being able’ to do something can be distinguished
from a ‘knowing that’. In turn, the very fact that it has been termed an
‘art’—with or without an ironic undertone—would seem to indicate that
‘interpretation’ is not a propositional ‘knowing that’, but rather a performative ‘knowing how’.
The distinction between these two types of knowledge goes back to
Gilbert Ryle.32 Central to Ryle’s differentiation is the idea that ‘knowing
how’ does not involve the explicit ‘spelling out’ of one’s knowledge of or
about something, but rather the carrying out of an act:
When a person knows how to do things of a certain sort (e.g., make good
jokes, conduct battles or behave at funerals), his knowledge is actualised or
exercised in what he does.
It is not exercised (save per accidens) in the propounding of propositions
or in saying ‘Yes’ to those propounded by others. His intelligence is exhibited by deeds, not by internal or external dicta. (Ryle 1945/1946: 8)
31
On the various disciplinary hermeneutics, see Gadamer (22004: 306–336). However, by
emphasizing the “exemplary significance of legal hermeneutics” (ibid.: 321) and by seeking
to turn the latter’s specific situationality into the foundation of hermeneutics in the humanities in general, Gadamer incurs precisely the problems that will be discussed in Sect. 1.4, esp.
pp. 26–31. In contrast, Olsen (2004) distinguishes between different “modes of interpretation”, but his notion of how literary scholars engage with texts is romanticizing and anachronistic: “The literary interpretation constitutes a way in which the poem is experienced and
not merely understood” (Olsen 2004: 146). The problem of ‘empathetic’ interpretations is
discussed in W. K. Wimsatt’s article “The Affective Fallacy” (1949), reprinted in Wimsatt
(1954/1970: 21–39). For a differentiation of interpretive goals, see also Bühler (2003).
32
See Ryle (1945/1946) and Chap. 2 in Ryle (1949/1966). The following remarks are
based on Hempfer/Traninger (2007: 9–12).
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1 INTERPRETATION
11
Here, Ryle implicitly acknowledges the performative character of ‘knowing how’, which sets it apart from propositional ‘knowing that’—provided, of course, that one does not limit the ambit of the performative to
the prototype of the performative utterance.33 ‘Knowing how’ is neither a
simple ‘doing’ nor a ‘talking about’: doing something simultaneously
shows that one can do something, or, to put it differently, it manifests in
an act that simultaneously constitutes an indexical sign for the ability to
perform it.34 Of course, one can try to formulate a priori or a posteriori the
rules that underlie said act, but such a formulation is precisely not identical
with carrying out the act itself. Ryle conceptualizes this relationship as
follows:
In short, the propositional acknowledgement of rules, reasons or principles
is not the parent of the intelligent application of them; it is a step-child of
that application. (Ryle 1945/1946: 9)
What Ryle is driving at here can be illustrated by a simple example: most
native speakers of natural languages are capable of producing ‘correct’
utterances, even though they are usually incapable of specifying the
underlying principles;35 were this otherwise, linguists would be out of
their jobs. It would appear, then, that mastering—knowing—a language
differs fundamentally from being able to explicate its rules, even if such
mastery is itself based on rules. If that is the case, then the “intellectualist
legend” according to which ‘knowing how’ can always be traced back to
‘knowing that’—a view Ryle argues against, whereas Snowdon (2004)
For details, see Sect. 3.1.2.
The difference to the prototype of the performative utterance is that this is not a case of
a semiotic act generating a simultaneous, non-semiotic one, but rather of the reverse: the act
is simultaneously a sign for the ability to perform it. ‘Knowing how’ thus converges to a
certain extent with another prototype of the performative, namely the theater model’s concept of ‘staging’. See Sect. 3.1.3.
35
For a convincing critique of the widespread notion that linguistic competence is a matter
of ‘knowing that’, see Devitt (2011).
33
34
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K. W. HEMPFER
tries to revive it36—is indeed obsolete: although ‘knowing how’ can, fundamentally, be reformulated as a certain number of ‘knowing that’ propositions, these reformulations are not identical with the act as such; a
cookbook doesn’t cook, and a speaker of English doesn’t utter English
grammar.
That ‘interpreting’ is not a matter of ‘knowing that’ but of ‘knowing
how’ like cooking or playing the piano is obvious from the way the term
can be combined with epistemic predicates in ordinary language. Both in
English and in German, I can say: ‘He can interpret’ or ‘he knows/understands how to interpret’, which designates a person’s general ability to
perform the activity called ‘interpreting’. In contrast, ‘he knows that he is
interpreting’ refers to something fundamentally different, namely the
awareness that a certain activity is being performed, with no implications
whatsoever as to the adequacy of that performance. To give another example: if I say about someone that he knows all that is necessary about the
history of the sonnet, this in no way implies that he can produce a ‘good’
interpretation of a concrete specimen of that poetic form.
Another indicator that interpretation involves a ‘knowing how’, that is,
a performative ability, and not a ‘knowing that’, that is, a propositional
knowledge, is the fact that the term collocates with the adjectives ‘good’
and ‘bad’ as opposed to ‘true’ and ‘false’—as a rule, I say: ‘A’s interpretation is good/bad’, but not ‘A’s interpretation is true/false’. As Ryle noted,
one cannot assign truth values to ‘knowing how’ as one can to propositions; instead, it is subject to the principle of “validity” (Ryle 1945/1946:
36
See Ryle (1945/1946: 8), quotation ibid. On the current state of Snowdon’s argument,
see Snowdon (2011) as well as the riposte against it in Hornsby (2011). Whereas the fundamental distinction between the two forms of knowledge seems to be undisputed, the question of whether a ‘knowing how’ can always ultimately be converted into a ‘knowing that’ is
still a point of contention. For a comprehensive overview of the controversy between ‘intellectualists’ and ‘anti-intellectualists’, see Bengson/Moffett (2011), as well as the contributions in Bengson/Moffett (ed.) (2011). Independently of this discussion, Collins (2001)
defines ‘tacit knowledge’ as largely analogous to ‘knowing how’, and ‘explicit knowledge’ to
‘knowing that’, as becomes clear from statements like the following: “[Tacit knowledge]
covers those things we know how to do but are unable to explain to someone else” (Collins
2001: 108). Collins, moreover, insists that tacit knowledge cannot fully be converted into
explicit knowledge: “It may be, then, that while one can make more and more aspects of traditional knowledge explicit, explicit knowledge, however much of it there is, must always rest
on unarticulated knowledge” (ibid.: 114). Collins is a sociologist, but it is nonetheless
astounding that the debate about ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ appears to have eluded
him entirely.
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1 INTERPRETATION
13
12). It is only the products of this ability—individual interpretive statements—that can be true or false, insofar as they are formulated, or can be
reformulated, as propositions.37 This, then, is not a question, as Freundlieb
thinks, of assigning to interpretive utterances the status of ‘recommendations’ and grounding them in an “ethics of communication”,38 but rather
of distinguishing between the ability to interpret as a precondition for the
potential validity of interpretations, and the results of this ability, the concrete interpretations. While interpretive hypotheses represent propositions
that can be verified by referring to the text, the ‘knowing how’ of the
interpreter who formulated these propositions cannot be reduced, at least
not completely, to a propositional knowledge. The understanding of
‘interpretation’ as ‘knowing how’ that I am suggesting here resembles that
of Donald Davidson, who does not employ this specific term in his theory
of interpretation, but who stresses the necessity of “intuition, luck, and
skill” and the particular importance of “taste and sympathy”.39
This brings me to my second thesis:
Thesis 2 Interpretation as a performative ‘knowing how’ cannot be
reduced, at least not completely, to a propositional ‘knowing that’. As a
rule, interpreters are capable of more and other things than can be made
explicit in rules of interpretation. In turn, the irreducibility of a performative process to a propositional act means that the extent to which interpretations can be theorized is necessarily limited.
Even if, on a fundamental level, interpretive ability cannot (fully) be
grasped through explicit knowledge of rules of interpretation, this does
not mean that we must forego altogether the criterion of the reasonableness and pertinence of interpretations—rather, what is at stake is the question of how ‘good’ interpretive practice can be distinguished from a ‘less
good’ one. In attempting to answer this question, we can draw on
Aristotle’s Topics and Brandom’s ‘semantic inferentialism’.
37
The assignment of truth values to propositions is, of course, itself a theory-dependent
process whose results are falsifiable. See Titzmann (2013) and Sect. 1.3, p. 15, and Sect.
1.4, p. 29.
38
Freundlieb (1980: 429). On this issue, see already Hempfer (1983/2002: 11f.).
39
Davidson (1984/2001: 279). I first advocated the idea of interpreting as ‘knowing how’
in Hempfer (2009). With explicit reference to Ryle, Martus, too, asks whether we should not
assume “that we are capable of more than we know” (2015: 37).
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1.3 Interpretation as Topical Argumentation
and as Making the Implicit Explicit
At the beginning of his Topics, Aristotle draws a central distinction by differentiating demonstration or deduction in the strict sense from dialectical
deduction.
Whereas the former is based on “true and primary premises”, that is,
premises “that are not made convincing through other [premises], but are
convincing in themselves (100b18)”,40 the latter infers from established
opinions, endoxa, which are “those that are considered right either by all,
or by the majority, or by the most notable and illustrious” (100b20). Of
course, ‘dialectic’ in Aristotle does not mean the same as it does in Hegel
and post-Hegelian thought: Aristotle employs the term in reference to a
philosophical conversation structured in accordance with certain rules of
debate in which an attacker asks questions that the defender must answer.
Rainer Hegselmann reduced the distinction between logic and topics to a
succinct formula: For Aristotle, the Analytics are about “rational deduction”, that is, logic as a theory of consistency, while the Topics, like the
Sophistical Refutations, are concerned with “rational disputation”
(Hegselmann 1992: 66f.). Whereas Hegselmann sees in Aristotle’s Topics
a possible starting point for the development of a formal dialectic
(Hegselmann 1992: 67–72), I merely postulate that we can recur to the
Topics as a theory of rational disputation in order to clarify what constitutes the reasonableness—or unreasonableness—of literary interpretations. Here, two conditions of topical argumentation are of crucial
importance: first, that the argumentation be understood as a dialogue
between proponent(s) and opponent(s), and second, that the premises
from which conclusions are drawn be regarded not as primary, self-evident
truths, but as endoxa, that is, as more or less widely accepted opinions.
Interpretations are obviously not dialogues in the sense that Plato’s dialogues are dialogues; but every interpreter of a text has his opponents in
the already available interpretations, and must establish his interpretation
in contradistinction to other interpreters or interpretations. Even in the
rare cases where no other interpretations are available, or the interpreter
40
Aristotle (1985: 167, translation modified). On my recourse to the Topics, see already
Hempfer (2009: 27–32).
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1 INTERPRETATION
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deliberately tries to ignore them, opponents in the form of interpretive
alternatives are imagined only to be rejected by the proponent. Thus,
interpretation is not a kind of argumentative play in the narrow sense, but
rather an argumentative agon in which each interpretation seeks to establish itself as better—and this holds true even if the interpreter explicitly
denies that there could ever be such thing as a better interpretation, or
argues in favor of the absolute plurality of interpretations. It follows, then,
that interpretations are not deductions, but rather disputations whose
rationality can be determined via the form of the argument.
As we have seen, it is a core characteristic of topical argumentation—or
more precisely, of dialectical conclusions—that their premises are ‘merely’
established opinions, endoxa, and not primary, true propositions that are
convincing in and of themselves; and the fact that Aristotle’s ‘established
opinions’ include not only those that “are considered right either by all, or
by the majority”—the ‘commonsensical’ ones, so to speak—but also those
that are “considered right by experts, and among the latter either by all, or
by the majority, or by the most notable and illustrious” allows us to conclude that ‘being established’ is a relative attribute that can only be assigned
in reference to a specific group.41 In a nutshell, the rationality of a disputation essentially depends on which endoxa one accepts—and this brings us
directly to the problem of literary interpretation.
Before we proceed, it must be acknowledged that the maxim that
observation is always observation in the light of theories was already established by Karl Popper.42 Studies in the theory and hermeneutics of reception (particularly in the fields referred to as Rezeptionsästhetik and
wirkungsgeschichtliche Hermeneutik in German) have emphasized the
inevitable pre-judgmental structure of our understanding,43 and Stegmüller
has argued that the hermeneutic circle is in no way specific to the
See the introduction to Wagner and Rapp’s German translation (Aristotle 2004: 21).
See Popper (1934/41971, esp. p. 60–76): “Es gibt keine reinen Beobachtungen: sie sind
von Theorien durchsetzt und werden von Problemen und von Theorien gleitet.” (p.76)
[“There are no pure observations: they are permeated by theories and guided by problems
and theories”].
43
See Gadamer (22004), esp. pp. 278–306.
41
42
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K. W. HEMPFER
humanities, but results from a problem common to all academic disciplines, namely the theory-laden nature of observations.44
Yet I am concerned here not with the fundamental theoretical and epistemological problems as such, but rather with a particular aspect that is
inextricably linked to them: every interpretation incorporates a certain
number, large or small, of implicit or explicit assumptions that function as
premises for the argument, and the degree to which they are ‘established’
can vary greatly.
To give a simple example: if, when interpreting a Petrarchan sonnet, I
start from the premise that a poem is the individual expression of a spontaneous, genuine feeling—whatever this may mean—then I will either
keep belaboring my text until I can pass off its structural characteristics as
the consequence of that premise, or, if I am somewhat more sophisticated,
I will advance the argument that the poem is steeped in literary conventions and intertextual relationships that render preposterous any notion of
spontaneity and emotional sincerity. Thus, Carlo Dionisotti, one of the
leading Italianists of the past century, described the introductory poem in
Bembo’s Canzoniere as an “extremely weak sonnet” (“debolissimo
sonetto”)45 that was nothing more than a “mosaic of Petrarchan set
pieces” (“mosaico di tessere petrarchesche”)—a picture-perfect example
of how an at least partly sound observation can lead to a completely mistaken evaluation if one applies an unquestioned, presupposed concept of
44
For details, see Stegmüller 1979 (first presented as a lecture at the Philosophenkongress of
1972). Göttner (1973), a doctoral dissertation supervised by Stegmüller, draws on the example of a concrete interpretation to demonstrate the extent to which literary interpretations
are based on the procedure of producing and testing hypotheses explicated by the analytical
philosophy of science. For some time now, there has been talk of the “hypothetical-deductive
method of literary interpretation” (Føllesdal et al. 1977/2008: 70–78), which has given rise
to the mistaken impression that this is one method among others (see, e.g., Descher et al.
2015: 43–45)—what Stegmüller, Göttner, and Føllesdal actually wanted to show was that
literary interpretation, too, is based on “normal scientific activity” (as Mantzavinos 2014: 47
characterizes the so-called HD method), and that hermeneutic circles are best avoided.
However, the fundamental problematization of “normal scientific activity” by Kuhn (1962)
and the subsequent discussion (for details, see Stegmüller 1973) means that a simple recourse
to Popper’s falsificationism, which is the foundation of the ‘HD method’, is no longer possible from an epistemological point of view (for a discussion of this issue with a special focus
on literary theories, see Göttner/Jacobs (1978), a text that has received very little attention,
probably because of its considerable degree of formalization). I am trying to approach the
problem of the potential arbitrariness (and thus of the ‘scientific’ irrelevance) of interpretations in a different theoretical framework.
45
See the commentary in Bembo (21966/1978: 507, n.1).
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literary originality and individuality. The positive re-evaluation of
Petrarchist lyric poetry in recent decades is based precisely on the fact that
the presupposition of the universal validity of a historical—namely,
Romantic—understanding of poetry was abandoned; once this historically
variable concept had lost its status as endoxon, it no longer qualified as an
‘established opinion’ that could serve as the premise for concrete interpretations, at least not if the latter sought to represent the scholarly state of
the art. What this example also shows is the ‘group-specific’ relativity of
the endoxa under discussion here: whereas the average educated reader
probably still believes in the universality of the Romantic conception of
literature they picked up in school and will read texts accordingly, this
selfsame conception has lost its status as established opinion in expert circles—in effect, different types of readers can be differentiated according to
what notion of literature they count as ‘established’.46
A further example of an established opinion that was long highly
esteemed in various circles (the ‘bourgeoisie’ included) is the Marxist theory of reflection, according to which the cultural superstructure is, more
or less monocausally, determined by the economic base.47 The pull of this
‘opinion’ can still be discerned in Adorno’s “Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft” (“On Lyric Poetry and Society”), where he—paradoxically—argues that the social dimension of the lyric consists in its non-­
social character.48 The return to immanence that came with the advent of
deconstruction was opposed by the New Historicism, which vied with
gender, queer, postcolonial, and other cultural studies for recognition as
the established opinion. The numerical explosion of approaches that all
wanted to be established opinions caused an implosion of literary studies:
the field disintegrated into a multitude of individual schools of thought,
each of which postulated as established an opinion that was anything but;
and as dialectical argumentation no longer rested on an established basis,
but only on an opinion postulated as such, interpretation became something of an aleatory business.
46
This, of course, amounts to a relativization of the concept of ‘established opinion’ that
Aristotle is unlikely to have envisaged—see also the editors’ comments in Aristotle (2004: 22).
47
For a systematic presentation and criticism of this ‘theory’, see Karbusický 1973 (the
original Czech edition published in 1969 was confiscated and destroyed), as well as Eibl
(1976: 16–20), Göttner/Jacobs (1978: 149–207), and Kablitz (2013: 46–57).
48
See Adorno (2019: 59–73), esp. p. 64: “I am not trying to deduce lyric poetry from
society; its social substance is precisely what is spontaneous in it, what does not simply follow
from the existing conditions at the time” (my italics).
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So, what am I getting at here? I shall try to summarize my position in
four further theses:
Thesis 3 From the perspective of argumentation theory, literary interpretation can be conceptualized as topical in the sense of Aristotle’s Topics.
Thesis 4 Dialectical deduction presupposes that the premise(s) is (are) not
arbitrary, but reflect an established opinion; arbitrary premises can only
lead to arbitrary conclusions.
Thesis 5 Having an established opinion is clearly a weaker concept than
having a theory. That ‘genres’ are in some way communicatively relevant
probably constitutes an established opinion; what a theory of genre should
look like, however, is still largely a matter of debate. The same holds true
for a theory of fiction.
Thesis 6 If literary interpretation indeed represents a ‘knowing how’, then
this knowledge is, by definition, impossible to grasp by means of a systematic theory—we can only formulate the rules of the game that make the
individual moves possible without predetermining them. Such rules must
exist, because otherwise no one would know what game was being played.
This, then, is not a matter of ‘anything goes’, as that would destroy the
game’s distinctive character—instead, rules apply that designate concrete
moves as appropriate. If, moreover, it is correct that ‘knowing how’ allows
interpretation to be conceptualized as topical argumentation with regard
to a key aspect, namely the relationship between background knowledge
and singular hypotheses, then one of the rules of the game is, naturally,
that an explanation is (or can be) given as to why an opinion qualifies as
established, or, vice versa, why established opinions are only arbitrary
postulations.
This, of course, is not to say that literary interpretations can be reconstructed in toto as topical argumentations that are based on syllogisms in
which the major premise is formed by endoxal background knowledge; as
a rule, this knowledge is not spelled out explicitly but merely implied, so
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1 INTERPRETATION
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that, logically speaking, we are dealing with an enthymeme.49 But what
does ‘implied’ mean?
In recent decades, research in the fields of linguistics and the philosophy of language has focused in various ways on the implicit character of
natural language communication, which is based on inferential relations
that cannot be reduced to syllogistic conclusions. Essential milestones
include Oswald Ducrot’s Dire et ne pas dire (1972), which drew on the
concept of ‘presupposition’ first developed primarily in the context of the
analytical philosophy of language to describe the semantics of natural
languages,50 Paul Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” (1975), which pioneered the concept of ‘conversational implicature’, and finally Robert
B. Brandom’s Making It Explicit (1994). In the latter, Brandom harnessed
pragmatic theories of meaning first articulated in Wittgenstein’s later work
to support his method of “semantic inferentialism”, which operates on the
fundamental principle of “privileging inference over reference in the order
of semantic explanation” (Brandom 2001: 1).51 For Brandom, this means
“offering an account of referential relations to objects, in terms ultimately
of inferential relations among claims” (ibid.: 28). Here, ‘inference’ refers
49
Our example (Dionisotti on Bembo) could be rendered like this:
Major premise: Good poems are authentic and original.
Minor premise: Bembo’s introductory poem is neither authentic nor original.
Conclusion:
Bembo’s poem is a bad poem.
Since Dionisotti’s remarks leave the major premise implicit, we are dealing with an
enthymeme. For a logically exact definition of the term ‘syllogism’, see, for example, Menne
(1966: 90): “By syllogism we mean an inference consisting of two premises, each of which
makes a statement regarding two classes, whereof one class appears in both premises, and of
a conclusion, in which this latter class, the so-called middle term, is eliminated”. On the distinction between syllogism and enthymeme, see Lausberg (1998, §371).
50
I shall return to the significance of the concept of presupposition for a theory of fiction
(Chap. 2, Sect. 2.4.1). For an overview of the development of presupposition theory up to
the late 1970s, see Hempfer (1981).
51
Brandom’s Articulating Reasons is an “introduction to inferentialism” (hence the work’s
subtitle) which seeks to make the author’s basic ideas accessible to non-philosophers. On
Brandom’s importance not only for the philosophy of language, but also for “intellectual
history” as a whole, see Marshall (2013), who observes that “the inferentialism of Robert
Brandom is one of the most interesting contemporary philosophical projects with historical
implications” (p. 1). I first drew on Brandom in Hempfer (2015).
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K. W. HEMPFER
to all kinds of if-then relationships, with the focus being not on formal
inferential relations, but rather on what Sellars calls “material inference”,52
from which other inferential relations can then be deduced. Brandom cites
as an example the inferences from “Pittsburgh is to the west of Princeton”
to “Princeton is to the east of Pittsburgh” and from “Lightning is seen
now” to “Thunder will be heard soon”, and comments:
It is the contents of the concepts west and east that make the first a good
inference, and the contents of the concepts lightning and thunder, as well as
the temporal concepts, that make the second appropriate. Endorsing these
inferences is part of grasping or mastering those concepts, quite apart from
any specifically logical competence. (Brandom 2001: 52)
The second sentence of the quote not only highlights the difference
between material and logical inference, but also the extent to which
Brandom privileges inference over reference. Starting from Sellars’ principle, according to which “grasping a concept is mastering the use of a
word” (cited in Brandom 2001: 6), Brandom constructs a theory of
meaning that seeks to fathom, on the basis of the use of a word, the meaning of a concept through its inferences. Thus, a concept is given a meaning
not through its reference, as in referential semantics, but rather through
the inferential conclusions that it allows. In analogy to linguistic semantic
field theory and to sense-relational semantics (to which, however, Brandom
does not refer), and in distinction from the tradition of model-theoretic
semantics in the philosophy of language, the point is not that a semantic
interpretant is assigned to a particular element (e.g., a proper name)—
what is at stake here are the inferential relations between the contents of
concepts:
52
See Sellars (1953/1980) and Brandom (2001: 52–55). As a foundation of semantic
theory, Brandom’s conception seems to differ fundamentally from other understandings of
‘inference’; see, for example, the section “‘Wissen einbringen’: Inferenzen”, in Winko/
Jannidis (2015: 230–233) and the literature referred to there. For Brandom, the point is not
to ‘garner’ knowledge via inferences—the constitution of meaning as such is inferential and
not primarily referential in nature.
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[T]he content of each concept is articulated by its inferential relations to
other concepts. (Brandom 2001: 15f.)53
If “conceptual contents” are “inferential roles” (Brandom 2001: 56), then
what does ‘making the implicit explicit’ mean in concrete terms? It is precisely in answering this question that Brandom distinguishes between
‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’:
The view expounded in these pages is a kind of conceptual pragmatism
(broadly, a form of functionalism) in this sense. It offers an account of
knowing (or believing, or saying) that such and such is the case in terms of
knowing how (being able) to do something. It approaches the contents of
conceptually explicit propositions or principles from the direction of what is
implicit in practices of using expressions and acquiring and deploying beliefs.
(Brandom 2001: 4)
The goal, then, is to deduce from implicit linguistic action, from a ‘knowing how’, explicit conceptual propositions that constitute a ‘knowing
that’. As exemplary of this process Brandom cites, once again following
Sellars, the “Socratic method”, which
[...] depends on the possibility of making implicit commitments explicit in
the form of claims. Expressing them in this sense is bringing them into the
game of giving and asking for reasons as playing the special sort of role in
virtue of which something has a conceptual content at all, namely, an inferential role, as premise and conclusion of inferences. (Brandom 2001: 57)
Crucially, neither Brandom’s ‘making explicit’ nor the ‘Socratic method’
are random ‘language games’—rather, the latter is described as
[…] a way of bringing our practices under rational control by expressing
them explicitly in a form in which they can be confronted with objections
and alternatives, a form in which they can be exhibited as the conclusions of
inferences seeking to justify them on the basis of premises advanced as reasons, and as premises in further inferences exploring the consequences of
accepting them. (Brandom 2001: 56)
53
Elsewhere, Brandom formulates the point this way: “It follows immediately from such
an inferential demarcation of the conceptual that in order to master any concepts, one must
master many concepts. For grasp of one concept consists in mastery of at least some of its
inferential relations to other concepts” (Brandom 2001: 49).
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K. W. HEMPFER
According to Brandom’s semantic theory, we make what we say implicitly
explicit as conclusions of inferences that we deduce rationally from implicit
premises. These conclusions serve as premises for further inferences,
whose acceptability can in turn be examined.
By extension, Brandom’s model for the constitution of meaning in
ordinary language demonstrates why literary texts inevitably require interpretation: if even the functioning of ordinary linguistic communication is
based on complex inferential relationships, then this must be all the more
true for overdetermined literary texts. On the semantic level, we are
obliged to consider not only individual words and sentences but also discursive units, which are themselves based on literary genres and textual
traditions, while also referring back, in the most diverse ways, to the prevailing epistemai. In addition, there are also relationships to the syntactical
level (in the general semiotic sense, e.g., syntax, meter, etc.) and to the
pragmatic level (e.g., the speaker(s), the addressee(s), etc.)—that is, the
semantic level is correlated with other levels, which in turn contribute to
the implicit constitution of meaning which must be made explicit.
As becomes evident from what I have just said, I am not at all concerned with simply reframing Brandom’s semantic theory as a theory of
interpretation; instead, what interests me is that his inferential theory of
meaning can serve as the point of departure for such a theory. This holds
above all for the following aspects:
(1) The assignment of meaning is based on making the implicit explicit.
(2) This process is not in any way arbitrary, but rather is based on linguistically indicated inferential relations.
(3) The premises that are made explicit are claims that can be defended
and rejected in an argumentative agon.
(4) From the premises that are made explicit, further premises can be
deduced whose conclusions can again be (argumentatively)
examined.
With these points in mind, common misunderstandings of literary interpretation can be refuted. If explicit meanings are assigned to a literary text
on the basis of textual evidence and a process of inference based on criteria
of rationality, then they are not in any way ‘given’, but created in the interplay between ‘textual data’ and inferential relations, and that means: constructed. As a result, there is no ultimately valid, ‘true’ interpretation,
because both the data and the inferential processes can be challenged—
what does exist, however, are more persuasive and less persuasive
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1 INTERPRETATION
23
interpretations. This in turn necessitates the acceptance of a criterion of
rationality, which, to modify one of Hermann Lübbe’s maxims, could be
formulated as follows: “He is rational who, in his assumptions regarding
texts, grants to better arguments an unlimited validity over his own”.54 My
understanding of interpretation is thus anything but relativistic.55
Thesis 7 ‘Interpretation’ can be understood as the making explicit of
implicit inferential relationships. Whereas the syllogistic conclusions of
Aristotle’s Topics, with an ‘established opinion’ (endoxon) as the major
premise, cover chiefly the relation between presupposed background
knowledge and singular hypotheses regarding individual texts, the concept of ‘material inference’ outlined by Sellars and Brandom is aimed at
any form of inferential relationship that can be constructed on the basis of
our ordinary linguistic and—we will presently return to this—general
socio-cultural knowledge. The term ‘construction’ is apposite here,
because the implicit does not simply yield the explicit of its own accord—it
must be made explicit, that is, claims based on an if-then structure must
be formulated and their premises disclosed, which can in turn be put in
question and defended. With regard to both Aristotle’s Topics and
Brandom’s inferentialism, interpretation can therefore be conceptualized
as an argumentative agon whose rationality is based on the fact that those
engaging in it are willing and able to distinguish between arbitrary and
non-arbitrary inferential relationships.56
Understanding ‘interpretation’ as an argumentative agon clarifies its
initial characterization as a kind of ‘knowing how’ that can, to a certain
54
In an essay entitled “Wer kann sich historische Aufklärung leisten?”, Lübbe writes: “He
is enlightened who, in his assumptions regarding reality, grants to better arguments an
unlimited validity over his own” (1977: 31). Lübbe is here concerned with the question of
the extent to which political systems can afford to adopt enlightenment as the fundamental
form of rationality. Mantzavinos, too, argues for a “procedural rationality” of interpretation
(2014: 52).
55
For a critique of relativistic approaches, see Descher (2017).
56
Interpreting is thus a substantially more complex process than “the close reading of
individual texts” (Caracciolo 2016: 187), a basis on which Caracciolo’s project to build a
bridge to ‘cognitive literary studies’ does not look very promising. Even if ordinary-language
communication is already based on ‘interpretation’, it must be distinguished from scholarly
(literary) ‘interpretation’ (on this issue, see also the ‘maxims’ formulated in Sect. 1.4).
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K. W. HEMPFER
extent, be learned (just as one can learn to play the piano or to cook), but
that cannot be translated entirely into rules.57 We can, however, formulate
a number of interpretive maxims that render the general postulate of rationality methodologically concrete in the sense that they are geared specifically toward the problem of interpreting literary texts.
1.4 Some Interpretive Maxims
1.4.1 Maxim 1: Interpret Historically
It would seem absolutely self-evident that literary texts, like all other texts,
can be appropriately understood and interpreted only in the context of the
respective historical conditions and premises of communication. Yet, from
American New Criticism to German Werkimmanenz to Gadamer’s history
of effect to deconstruction, this obvious principle was either simply
neglected, stigmatized as naïve historicism, or deliberately dismissed as
irrelevant. From this de-historicization grew a multitude of pseudo-­
problems that have been ‘worked through’ in a whole plethora of theories
of interpretation without ever being solved, precisely because they are
pseudo-problems. One such pseudo-problem is the view that the meaning
of literary texts changes in the course of the history of their reception, and
that, as Dieter Freundlieb put it, “[a]uthors often want to communicate
not only with their contemporaries, but also with future readers, who, on
the basis of their changed knowledge of the world, wish to extract from or
assign to texts quite different meanings” (Freundlieb 1992: 35). Now, it
is surely true that authors want to ‘immortalize’ themselves with their
texts—it is no coincidence that Horace’s definition of his own poetry as a
monumentum aere perennius (“monument more enduring than bronze”,
carm. III, 30, 1) achieved topical omnipresence, especially in Renaissance
poetry.58 What this does not mean, however, is that Shakespeare, for one,
57
See Sect. 1.2. Even if an amateur cook follows to the letter a recipe in one of legendary
chef Eckart Witzigmann’s cookbooks, more often than not the result is anything but a threestar dish: the ambitious amateur lacks the ‘knowing how’ that the directions in the recipe
cannot formulate, or at least only to a certain extent. The example is banal, but well-founded
in everyday experience. Perhaps it is no accident that in the case of cooking, as in that of
interpreting, we speak of an ‘art’—always provided that one does it well. The most comprehensive attempt to date to formulate rules of interpretation can be found in Titzmann (1977).
58
On the topos of immortalization in the Renaissance, see Joukovsky (1969).
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wrote for Goethe or Stendhal and their time; even a literary genius like
him could not look into the future and composed his texts for the horizon
of expectations of his—Elizabethan—audience, which in turn reflected a
certain knowledge of texts and the world. As Freundlieb himself explicitly
states, it is the future readers who, “on the basis of their changed knowledge of the world, wish [wollen in the German original] to extract from or
assign to texts quite different meanings” (my italics); it is not the text and
its meaning that change—it is the readers.59 Through its producer (whether
the latter is known by name, anonymous, or a group), every text receives
a personal index which is also temporal and local—that is, every text is
limited in its semantic potential by the conditions of possibility that obtain
in the historical situation in which it is produced. Taking these conditions
into account can be considered a necessary premise for a historically
appropriate interpretation.60
In formulating the maxim of historicity, I am not advocating a return
to the author as the normative authority for interpretation as it has been
propagated recently, let alone to an explicitly historicist position like the
one taken by Stecker (Stecker 2003: 26). Why this is so will become clear
in Maxim 5; for now, what has been said up to this point brings us to
Maxim 2.
For a more detailed discussion, see Hempfer (1983/2002, esp. pp. 16–23).
Willand (2016) speaks of a “minimal condition” (p. 194). In the wake of Limpinsel
(2013), problems with the concept of the historical ‘appropriateness’ of interpretations have
arisen from the commingling of the rhetorical and the hermeneutic senses of the term. The
rhetorical ‘appropriateness’ (prepon/aptum/decorum) is the fundamental norm of the
rhetorical-­cum-poetical tradition on which the distinction of different styles, genres, etc. is
based (see also Chap. 5, Sect. 5.5), and which is deliberately infringed upon in the literature
of Modernity. An interpretation of a poem by Baudelaire based on the criterion of rhetorical
appropriateness would thus be very inappropriate in historical terms. As a result, we must
draw a fundamental distinction between ‘appropriateness’ (prepon, etc.) as a historically variable norm on the textual level, and historical appropriateness as a systematic norm on the
theoretical level. Put another way: ‘rhetorical appropriateness’ is a historically variable constituent of the aesthetic object, whereas ‘historical appropriateness’ is an epistemological
constituent of a theory of interpretation. These two concepts should consequently be clearly
distinguished and cannot be addressed by one and the same theory, even if ‘relationships’
between them have historically been constructed.
59
60
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K. W. HEMPFER
1.4.2 Maxim 2: Distinguish Between ‘Reception’
and ‘Interpretation’
This distinction already presupposes another one, namely that between
‘text’ and ‘reception’. When Gadamer states that
understanding is never a subjective relation to a given ‘object’ but to the
history of its effect; in other words, understanding belongs to the being of
that which is understood. (Gadamer 22004: XXVIII)
he overrides the categorial distinction between the object (= text) and the
subject (= reader) of reception. This makes it fundamentally impossible to
rule out certain modes of understanding as inadequate, because every
mode of reception necessarily “belongs to the being of that which is
understood”.61 The inseparability of text and reception—Gadamer uses
the term “effect” (Wirkung)—in turn leads to the methodological metaphor of the “fusion of horizons”.62 As early as 1975, Rainer Warning
argued that one of the “weak points” (1975: 12) of reception aesthetics
consisted in its inability to state, on the foundation of its a priori assumption of a fusion of horizons, how adequate and less adequate receptions or
interpretations could be distinguished, notwithstanding the fact that both
Gadamer and Jauß continued to assert this possibility in different ways.63
Against the background of the international discussion, the mainly
German hermeneutic debate that began with Gadamer appears to be
61
On this argument, see already Hempfer (1983/2002: 18). Perhaps it might be possible
to reinterpret Gadamer in a constructivist sense here, but then his statement would no longer
align with his ontological concept of understanding. For a constructivist perspective on the
textual meaning produced in the process of interpretation, see Maxim 5.
62
See Gadamer (22004), esp. p. 305f. A rather intriguing take on this argument (with a
casual reference to Gadamer) is formulated by Hancher (1981: 278): “The speech act of
interpretation is like brokerage or mediation: its business is to bring about a meeting of
minds, and when that business is done a celebration is in order”. Unfortunately, Hancher
does not divulge how this “meeting of minds” can be realized if the author and the reader
are classified a priori as pursuers of “disparate interests” (ibid.).
63
See esp. Hans-Robert Jauß’s remarks on the “objectification of the horizon of expectations” of contemporary readers (Jauß 1967: 32–35, quotation on p. 34). For an early critique of the hermeneutics of effective history and its reception among literary scholars, see
Warning (1975: 19–25); for a current summary of Gadamer’s influence on literary studies,
see the contributions in Dutt (ed.) (2012). The fundamental differences between Gadamer
and Jauß (and the internal inconsistencies that affect both positions) have recently been
demonstrated by Andreas Kablitz (2013: 97–106).
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rather anachronistic.64 This, I would argue, is at least partly due to the fact
that the Anglo-American debate about anachronism, which had been
going on since the 1930s and was initiated primarily by the Cambridge
school of historiography, remained largely unknown in the German-­
speaking world until a few years ago, especially in the field of literary studies65—after all, it is precisely in this methodological context that the fusion
of horizons that is presupposed as inevitable by the hermeneutics of effective history is subjected to theoretical reflection. Contrary to strict understandings of anachronism,66 which reject not only the retroactive projection
of modern presuppositions of understanding, but also the use of any modern terminology, Koselleck rightly emphasized that a distinction must be
drawn between the vocabulary of the source and that of modern theoretical discourse, and that the former can and must be reconstructed through
the latter, because otherwise the sources would simply be repeated.67 As
heterogeneous as the various critiques of anachronism may be, what they
all have in common is their rigorous rejection of what Gadamer was trying
to establish as the inevitable prerequisite of any understanding: the fusion
of horizons.
64
For a fundamental critique of the inconsistency of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, see already
Hirsch (1967), esp. the appendices.
65
For a thoroughly comprehensive overview, see Spoerhase (2007: 145–225), along with
the contributions collected in Scientia poetica 10 (2006).
66
Spoerhase (2007: 184) gives the following definition of ‘anachronism’: “In komplexen
Darstellungen eines historischen Zusammenhangs Z, für den ein Zeitindex t wesentlich ist,
finden sich einzelne Elemente E, die für einen anderen, zeitlich späteren Zusammenhang Zt+n
oder zeitlich früheren Zusammenhang Zt−n in der Weise charakteristisch sind, dass sie (nach
einem als gegeben angenommenen Wissen) für Zt noch nicht oder nicht mehr angesetzt
werden können. […] Für den progressiven Anachronismus gilt: ‘Erreur qui consiste à situer
une chose (être, objet, circonstance, événement) en un temps où elle n’existait pas encore’.
Für den regressiven Anachronismus gilt: ‘Erreur inverse, qui place une chose (être, situation,
etc.) en un temps où elle a cessé d’exister, où son usage est aboli’ (Morier 1998: 102)”. [“In
complex representations of a historical context Z, for which a temporal index t is essential,
there are individual elements E which are characteristic for another, temporally later context
Zt+n or a temporally earlier context Zt−n, in such a way that they (according to knowledge
presupposed as given) cannot yet or can no longer be applied to Zt. […] Progressive anachronism is ‘[a]n error that consists in situating a thing (being, object, circumstance, event) in a
time when it did not yet exist’. Regressive anachronism is ‘[t]he inverse error, which places a
thing (being, situation, etc.) in a time when it has ceased to exist, or its usage has been
abolished’”.]
67
See Koselleck (1981/2006) and Moos (1998), both of whom are discussed in Spoerhase
(2007: 155–157).
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K. W. HEMPFER
If we correlate these two positions with the problem of differentiating
between ‘reception’ and ‘interpretation’, then Gadamer’s fusion of horizons describes rather exactly what happens in the course of ‘normal’
reception—a more or less conscious ‘encumberment’ of texts from the
past with present-day questions that are, at worst, manifested in the form
‘What does Goethe (still) have to say to us today?’ The anachronism
debate, meanwhile, is concerned with the exact opposite, namely with the
question of under which methodological presuppositions such an ‘encumberment’ can be avoided. This allows us to distinguish between ‘normal
reception’ and ‘scholarly reception’ (= interpretation): as a rule, ‘(normal)
reception’ is based on a more or less pronounced connection between the
current premises of understanding and historical texts; indeed, it postulates the possibility of such a connection as the very reason that justifies
continuing to ‘pay attention’ to them. In contrast, ‘interpretation’ or
‘scholarly reception’ is or ought to be characterized by theory-guided
reflection on the historically appropriate connectability of premises of
understanding. In short, what differentiates ‘reception’ from ‘interpretation’ is adherence or non-adherence to the maxim of historicity. What in
recent literary theory is understood as ‘reading’ therefore has much less in
common with ‘interpretation’ than it does with normal reception. If,
indeed, ‘interpretation’ is theory-guided reflection on the historically
appropriate connectability of premises of understanding, theoretical terms
must need to enter into this reflection—terms that necessarily do not form
part of the historical semantics of the respective object of study, which
otherwise could only ever be paraphrased. To adduce a simple example: it
goes without saying that a modern narratological analysis of a sixteenth-­
century epic employs concepts such as the distinction between author and
narrator, or between discours and histoire, which are not present, or present only in rudimentary form, in contemporary Early Modern poetics.
This does not constitute an anachronism, but rather the application of an
analytical toolkit that reflects the current theoretical ‘state of the art’ (and
can, of course, always be superseded) in order to grasp the structure and
meaning of historical texts more appropriately than would be possible
using the conceptual arsenal of sixteenth-century poetics; what is anachronistic, however, is the retrospective projection onto sixteenth-century
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1 INTERPRETATION
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texts of a way of understanding literature that first appeared with the
Romantics, as was explained above using the example of Bembo.68
In pre-Gadamerian hermeneutics, the fundamental difference between
‘reception’ and ‘interpretation’ was recognized in the form of the distinction between subtilitas intelligendi and subtilitas explicandi,69 which allows
us to conceptualize ‘reception’ and ‘interpretation’ independently from
the problem of ‘historicity’. In linguistics and recent social sciences, the
distinction between the participants in a communication scenario and
their scholarly observer is taken for granted—the linguist is not the user of
language, any more than the ethnologist is a member of the community to
be analyzed,70 or in other words: the terms subtilitas intelligendi and subtilitas explicandi refer to two separate entities. If we now combine this
hermeneutic differentiation between ‘reception’ and ‘interpretation’ with
the linguistic and socio-historical one discussed previously, then we can
conceptualize ‘reception’ as a semiotic relation between text and reader, in
which the recipient simply applies the premises of understanding at his
disposal to a given text; ‘interpretation’, meanwhile, designates an epistemological relation, in which the interpreter (qua epistemic subject) must
(be able to) explain why he assigns to the text (qua epistemic object) certain meanings, and not others.
If I speak of an interpreter ‘assigning’ meanings to a text, I do so in
deliberate contradistinction to traditional understandings of ‘interpretation’. Interpreting is not a matter of recovering from a text a meaning that
is in any sense ‘given’;71 instead, meaning is constructed by the epistemic
subject (the interpreter, who can draw on a certain level of theoretical
expertise) based on the properties of the epistemic object in question (the
text). Given that what we ‘see’ in a text is in various ways theory-­dependent,
it follows that we need criteria for judging the adequacy of the assignment
of meanings to texts, criteria that reflect precisely the interdependency
between the object level and the theoretical meta-level that I have just
discussed. The most important of these yardsticks proceeds from the
maxim of historicity and its negative consequence, the prohibition of
anachronism. What other conditions such an ‘assignment of meaning’
68
See Sect. 1.3, pp. 16f. This problem is evident in the majority of gender-driven research;
for a critical discussion of this issue and an approach that seeks to employ the concepts of
‘gender studies’ in a non-anachronistic manner, see Schneider (2007).
69
See, for example, Hirsch (1967: 253). Weimar (2002) also refers to this distinction.
70
See, for instance, Funk-Kolleg Sprache (1973): Chap. I as well as Oppitz (1975).
71
See Sect. 1.1, pp. 4f.
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30
K. W. HEMPFER
must fulfill, and how its epistemological status can be more narrowly
defined, will be outlined in the following maxims. But already at this point
I must emphasize that by ‘assignment of meaning’ I mean something at
least partially different from what Eco described as the ‘interpretive cooperation’ between the text and the reader (Eco 1979).72 First, Eco’s wonderful metaphor seems to me somewhat biased, since the relationship
between text and reader is an asymmetrical one: only the reader can ‘deal
with’ the text, whereas the latter is being dealt with and can resist ‘mistreatment’ only to a certain extent. Second, Eco does not differentiate
between the semiotic relation linking text and reader and the epistemological relation linking text and interpreter.73 Yet it is the interpreter who
analyzes the possibilities of understanding, that is, the semiotic relationship, and makes explicit what remains implicit in the process of understanding as such, which in turn opens up the possibility of distinguishing
adequate from less adequate understanding: clearly, texts are structured in
such a way as to ‘demand’ a non-arbitrary understanding, but they do not
themselves tell us which; for that, an interpreter is needed.
Drawing a fundamental distinction between ‘reception’ and ‘interpretation’ does not mean that research on the former cannot produce
extremely insightful results regarding the differing diachronic and diastratic
ways of dealing with the status of individual authors and texts, as well as of
literature in general, nor does it imply that there is no methodological correlation between ‘reception’ and ‘interpretation’. For one, testimonies
regarding reception are not self-explanatory; they also require interpretation.74 Moreover, a certain type of reception research can function as a
‘heuristic of interpretation’, namely that in which the contemporary reception of a historical text is analyzed not only in order to reconstruct an
abstract horizon of expectations, but also the premises of understanding
that are implicit in concrete contemporary modes of reception. Since it is
not uncommon for this approach to reveal highly divergent contemporary
72
Eco first developed his cooperative model of interpretation in Eco (1979) and pursued
it further in later works (e.g., Eco 1990). For an overview of the evolution of Eco’s theory
of interpretation, see Schalk (2000); on commonalities and differences with Konstanz-style
reception aesthetics, see Hempfer (1999/2002). For a pivotal critique of the “interactional
fallacy”, see Pettersson (2009: 147–151).
73
The same goes for Detel (2011). See ibid.: 15–50, esp. pp. 35–37.
74
A crux of older approaches to the history of reception and/or effect consists precisely in
the fact that it frequently did not advance beyond a mere paraphrase of the reception
documents.
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1 INTERPRETATION
31
assignments of meaning,75 the reasons why this is so should be investigated. In this way, historical reception research can become a veritable
‘arsenal’ for the elaboration of new interpretive hypotheses, one that
simultaneously establishes a link between later interpretations and the
originary premises of understanding. The analysis of contemporary reception connects the modern interpretation (whose hypotheses are constructed based on the theoretical standard as it stands at the time) with the
historical text’s conditions of understanding without identifying the latter
with a particular instance of reception. Reception research in the sense
outlined here thus enables a historicization of the hypotheses on which
interpretations are predicated, while evading the twin pitfalls of naïve (viz.,
theoretically unreflected) historicism on the one hand, and a necessarily
arbitrary ‘fusion of horizons’ on the other.
1.4.3 Maxim 3: Grasp the Text in Its Entirety
and Avoid Nihilations
This maxim is similarly fundamental and similarly difficult to realize in a
concrete interpretation as the maxim of historicity. It is certainly one of
the most common manifestations of the practice of interpretation that,
despite an interpretive statement that is aimed at the meaning of the text
in its totality, parts of said text simply ‘fall by the wayside’. While this is
unproblematic so long as the left-out passages support the general interpretive hypothesis, it does become an issue when the omissions complicate
the interpretation or even raise fundamental doubts as to its validity. Often,
this is not merely a matter of ‘skipping over’ certain passages, which is
ultimately the most basic scenario—in many cases, the complex interdependence of extremely diverse elements that characterizes literary texts
(ranging from meter to genre conventions, discursive traditions, and
­transhistorical modes of writing) is not, or not sufficiently, taken into
­consideration. To give another very simple example: if, in the first canto of
Orlando Furioso, the narrator comments on Angelica’s account of her
adventures so far, which ends with her assertion that, despite all her
­tribulations, she has “preſeru’d the floure of her virginitie” (fior virginal),
with the words
75
A paradigmatic example of this is the reception of Orlando Furioso in the sixteenth century. See Hempfer (1987); on historical reception research as a “heuristic of interpretation”,
see ibid.: Chap. 1.
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K. W. HEMPFER
Forse era ver, ma non però credibile (O.F. I, 56, 1)
It might be true, but ſure it was incredible,76
then the usage of verso sdrucciolo,77 a typical feature of comedy and other
low or popular genres, lends his semantically paradoxical commentary a
decidedly comic air; this in turn establishes a sense of ironic distance
between the narrator and his allegedly serious story, which, from the very
beginning, sets Orlando Furioso apart from the classical epic tradition and
from the genre conventions of medieval chivalric romance. Since its first
reception, Orlando Furioso has been a prime example of how fundamentally contradictory readings and interpretations come about not only by
misunderstanding or deliberately ignoring interdependencies between different textual structures, but also by simply omitting whole sections of the
text. Usually, this results not from plain ‘malice’, but from an attempt to
stabilize assigned meanings against the resistance of the object, that is, the
text. To that end, everything that contradicts the applied epistemic system
is excluded, a process described in the sociology of knowledge with the
term ‘nihilation’:
[N]ihilation denies the reality of whatever phenomena or interpretations of
phenomena do not fit [into a given universe of meaning]. (Berger/
Luckmann 1966: 106)
A paradigmatic example of such a ‘nihilation’ is Croce’s concept of
armonia,78 which for decades, at least in Italy, served as the ‘established
opinion’ that informed any exegesis of Orlando Furioso, and which continues to ‘show through’ in individual studies to this day.79
If deconstruction has taught us anything, then it is doubtless the problematization of an organicistic conception of the work of art which presupposes categories such as ‘coherence’, ‘harmony’, ‘unity’, etc. as
self-evident properties of any aesthetic object; on the other hand, the concepts the deconstructive approach championed instead—‘openness’,
‘resistance’, and ‘discrepancy’—were once again ahistorically absolutized
Cited from Sir John Harington’s English translation of 1591 (Ariosto 1972: 25).
See Beltrami (52011: 213). The reference is to a verse ending that has the accent on the
antepenultimate syllable.
78
See the essay on Ariosto in Croce (1920/1968: 3–68).
79
See, for example, Verdicchio (1996), but also, to some extent, Ferroni (2008). Kablitz
was the first to apply the concept of nihilation to the field of reception analysis (see Kablitz
1985: 55f.).
76
77
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1 INTERPRETATION
33
as universally valid norms, which were then pressed into service to support
interpretive practices that fully intended to read the text against the grain
in order to make it plural, as Barthes recommended and demonstrated in
S/Z.80 Clearly, our goal should not be to exchange one ahistorical concept
of the work of art for another, but rather to forego normative concepts as
self-evident presuppositions for interpretation in order to avoid nihilations. Conversely, establishing the presence of nihilation strategies is one
of the basic methods to falsify ‘given’ interpretations.
1.4.4 Maxim 4: Begin by Relating the Properties of the Text
to Those of the Literary System, and Do Not Prematurely Correlate
Different Socio-cultural Subsystems
This maxim picks up on one of the core theses set forth by Tynyanov and
Jakobson in 1928, which fell into oblivion in the vulgar Marxist sociology
of literature practiced not solely in the former Eastern Bloc, but also in the
‘social history of literature’ current primarily in West German Germanistik
of the 1970s and 1980s and in present-day cultural studies:
The history of literature (art), being simultaneous with other historical
series, is characterized, as is each of these series, by an involved complex of
specific structural laws. Without an elucidation of these laws, it is impossible
to establish in a scientific manner the correlation between the literary series
and other historical series. (Tynyanov/Jakobson 1928/1971: 79)81
As is well known, both the diachronic evolution and the synchronic structure of the literary system—or series, to use Tynyanov and Jakobson’s
terminology—are shaped by genres and discourses on whose ‘norms’ and
‘conventions’ the ideal author draws even when he deliberately rejects or
modifies them. Maxim 4 says no more and no less than that we must, in
the process of interpretation, refrain from immediately correlating
80
See Barthes (1974); for a critical examination, see Hempfer (1976: 55–58). Scholz
(2013) misses the point of the problem discussed here by identifying “textual meaning” with
a non-existent “object, property or other entity” (quotation ibid.: 149). Naturally, such an
entity does not ‘exist’ in an essentialist sense, because what produces it in the first place is the
examination of textual properties. It is, however, of central importance that the latter be
considered as comprehensively as possible.
81
For the Russian text, see Tynyanov/Jakobson (1928/1972: II, 386).
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34
K. W. HEMPFER
individual elements of concrete texts to non-literary systems and their discourses, and focus first on the literary order of discourse. While this principle appears trivial, it has nonetheless been ignored in extremely influential
methodologies and theories over decades. If, to return to our example,
one recognizes that Orlando Furioso cites, modifies, and plays off against
each other a variety of entirely different ‘chivalric’ (as well as non-­chivalric)
discourses without amalgamating them,82 then one cannot simply take a
line like
Oh gran bontà de’ cavallieri antiqui! (O.F. I, 22,1)
O auncient knights of true and noble hart. (Ariosto 1972: 21)
as evidence that Ariosto sought to oppose a past social ideality (which,
perhaps, was never actually social, but rather always already literary) to the
contemporary decline of heroic virtues; instead, one will ‘see’ that the line
in question—not least because of its specific context83—already represents
an ironic commentary on the thesis of decadence, and that the text itself
identifies potential interpretive schemata as insufficient. While the Italian
romanzo of the Renaissance could not recur to explicit contemporary
poetics, it implied a knowledge of pre-existing genre conventions and discursive traditions whose specific actualization the interpreter must grasp
before he can link the literary work to the properties of the overarching
socio-cultural system, or even seek to explain the specific ‘suchness’ of a
given text as a causal effect of the circumstances prevailing in other socio-­
cultural subsystems. Failure to take into account the various norms, conventions, traditions, and trans-generic components of the literary system
(such as the key concept of decorum) condemns interpretations to arbitrariness—especially those that focus on the social conditionedness of the
literary artifact.
See already Hempfer (1976a), and, more recently, Hempfer (2013).
Angelica is fleeing the Christian camp when she encounters Ferraù and Rinaldo. Only
the former is mounted, as the latter has lost his warhorse. While the two knights fight over
Angelica, she makes her escape, whereupon the adversaries decide to defer their battle and
hurry after her. Since Rinaldo is on foot, Ferraù—an amorous rival and a pagan!—literally
gives him a ride on his horse. This is followed immediately by the narrator’s commentary,
which begins with “Oh gran bontà” and continues for an entire octave.
82
83
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1 INTERPRETATION
35
1.4.5 Maxim 5: Consider the Author and the Reader, But Trust
Only the Text
While for many years the author’s death was celebrated, there have recently
been attempts to bring about his resurrection. The fact that the proclamation of his demise was initiated primarily by the French nouvelle critique84
can be understood as the almost inevitable consequence of the importance
attributed to the author in connection with the l’homme et l’oeuvre (‘the
man and his work’) method that had dominated French literary scholarship since Sainte-Beuve.85 In the nouvelle critique, however, the biographical reductionism of this method was superseded by an anachronism that
burdened historical texts with modern questions to which they could yield
only arbitrary answers.86 In Spoerhase (2007), the anachronism problem
becomes the central argument for a “return of the author”,87 and thus for
authorial intent as a yardstick for the validity of interpretations. Spoerhase’s
‘neo-intentionalism’, which connects the ‘rediscovery’ of the author with
a return to intentionalist arguments,88 is to be distinguished from the ‘factual intentionalism’ espoused by E.D. Hirsch in his Validity in
Interpretation (1967): while the latter was informed by the claim that “the
meaning of a text is the one that the author intended when he composed
the work”,89 the former favors the basic tenets shared by all the various
strands of ‘hypothetical intentionalism’, namely that “the author’s actual
84
See “La mort de l’auteur” (1968) in Barthes (2002, vol. 3: 40–45). On the death of the
author, see also Spoerhase (2007: 18–55). The following modifies and clarifies my deliberations in Hempfer (2015).
85
On this issue, see Grimm et al. (ed.) (1976: 108–113).
86
Paradigmatic of this approach is Barthes’ Sur Racine (1963), a work that was subjected
to devastating critique in a thèse d’État (see Pommier 1988).
87
See esp. the introduction (“Einleitung”, pp. 1–7), the concluding remarks (“Ausblick”,
pp. 439–448), and the passage that proclaims the “return of the author” (ibid.: 448).
88
Spoerhase explicitly draws on the work of Lutz Danneberg as well as on Jannidis et al.
(ed.) (1999, 2000). See also the chapter in Reemtsma (2016) entitled “Die Nachricht vom
Tode des Autors scheint übertrieben” (“Reports of the Author’s Death Appear to Have Been
Exaggerated”, pp. 58–71) and Hiebel (2017, esp. pp. 123–151).
89
Spoerhase (2007: 106). For a critical engagement with Hirsch’s tenets, see ibid.:
106–123 as well as Hempfer (1973: 93–97).
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K. W. HEMPFER
intentions are irrelevant”90 and that the “writer [… is] the producer of the
text, whereas the author is a product of interpretation”.91
The distinction between ‘utterer’s meaning’ and ‘utterance meaning’,
which goes back to Tolhurst 1979, is quintessential for hypothetical
intentionalism92:
[…] utterance meaning is best understood as the intention which a member
of the intended audience would be most justified in attributing to the author
based on the knowledge and attitudes which he possesses in virtue of being
a member of the intended audience. Thus utterance meaning is to be construed as that hypothesis of utterer’s meaning which is most justified on the
basis of those beliefs and attitudes which one possesses qua intended hearer
or intended reader. The reason utterer’s meaning and utterance meaning
diverge […] is that a member of the intended audience could be justified in
understanding the utterance as an attempt to fulfil an intention different
from the one the utterer in fact had. (Tolhurst 1979: 11)
Following a completely different line of argument—we shall return to
this—Tolhurst here arrives at a distinction that greatly resembles the
dichotomy between “authorial meaning” and “textual meaning” diagnosed by the anti-intentionalists Wimsatt and Beardsley more than a
decade earlier.93 In no small measure, the proximity between the ‘new’
hypothetical intentionalism and the ‘old’ anti-intentionalism is a result of
the goal assigned by Levinson to systematic literary interpretation, namely
Spoerhase (2007: 123). On ‘hypothetical intentionalism’ in general, see ibid.: 123–144.
Ibid.: 124. For a very perceptive and concise characterization of the various forms of
‘intentionalism’, see Irvin (2006). Irvin herself seems to favor the concept of a historically
constructed “postulated author HI” (HI= hypothetical intentionalism) who can serve as an
attributing authority for intentions; at the same time, however, she immediately raises the
question of whether ‘intentions’ are still needed, and whether one cannot refer directly to the
linguistic conventions that the respective historical author could draw on (Irvin 2006: 124f.).
This is precisely what my concluding remarks will be driving at.
92
The term goes back to Levinson (1996). Strube (2000) distinguishes between nonintentionalist, intentionalist, and transintentionalist theories of interpretation. While Strube
considers this tripartite division “sufficiently adequate” and “exhaustive” (p. 43, n.2), it
seems to me neither logically consistent (‘transintentional’ necessarily constitutes a subset of
‘non-intentional’), nor appropriate to the complexity of the theoretical situation (the intentionalist paradigm is identified with Hirsch 1967, whereas hypothetical intentionalism and its
proximity to anti-intentionalism remain undiscussed).
93
The terms are quoted from Beardsley (1968), who already engaged critically with Hirsch
(1967). For a recapitulation of the discussion that had been going on for several decades in
the context of the New Criticism, see Wimsatt (1968).
90
91
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to get at the utterance meaning of the text, that is, what it—not the author—
is saying, in its author-specific context. (Levinson 2002: 315)
Yet the seeming synonymity of ‘authorial meaning’ and ‘utterer’s meaning’ on the one hand, and ‘textual meaning’ and ‘utterance meaning’ on
the other, conceals a fundamental methodological difference: For the ‘old’
anti-intentionalism, the issue was how to distinguish systematically the
authorial intention (however defined) from the meaning of the text; the
‘new’ hypothetical intentionalism, meanwhile, refers to itself as such
because although it seeks to distinguish on a fundamental level between
authorial intention and textual meaning, it nonetheless subscribes to an
intentionalist conception of meaning, as becomes clear from Levinson’s
paradigmatic definition of ‘utterer’s meaning’ as “the speaker’s actual and
concrete intention” and ‘utterance meaning’ as “the most plausibly ascribed
intention to the utterer” (Levinson 1996: 191, my italics). The relationship between hypothetical intentionalism’s identification of ‘meaning’ and
‘intention’ and its distinction between authorial intention and textual
meaning may appear paradoxical, as the latter is essentially anti-­
intentionalist in nature. In this context, however, we must not overlook
the fact that the crucial commonality between Beardsley and Wimsatt on
the one hand, and the hypothetical intentionalists on the other hand consists, as Levinson formulates it, in their assumption of “an unbridgeable
gap between [...] utterer/author meaning and utterance/work meaning”
(Levinson 2010: 146). As will be sketched out in the following pages, it is
precisely this notion of an “unbridgeable gap”—a key concept of hypothetical intentionalism which stands in marked opposition to the factual
intentionalists’ “identity thesis” (Beardsley 1968: 174–181)—that makes
it possible to overcome the dichotomy of ‘intentionalism’ and ‘anti-­
intentionalism’. The proximity between hypothetical intentionalism and
anti-intentionalism results, moreover, from the fact that ‘utterance meaning’ does not refer to the author’s actual intentions, but rather to the
‘authorial intentions’ that proceed from the text itself as textual meanings.
Against this position, renewed attempts were made, especially by
Stecker, to justify a factual intentionalism that identified textual meaning
with actual authorial intention. While the objections raised by factual
intentionalists are comprehensively addressed and refuted in Levinson
(2002, 2010), I will not recapitulate Levinson’s argument in detail here—
after all, the fact that reliance on intentions in the analysis of meaning
necessarily leads to circularity and to a regressus ad infinitum was established (conclusively, in my opinion) as early as in 1973 in Black’s critical
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K. W. HEMPFER
response to Grice. As Black demonstrated, understanding intentions presupposes the understanding of linguistic utterances;94 at the same time,
the description of intentions is inevitably informed by meanings, which,
for their part, must be described through intentions, and so on and so
forth. This is exactly what Davidson argues:
[...] radical interpretation cannot hope to take as evidence for the meaning of
a sentence an account of the complex and delicately discriminated intentions
with which the sentence is typically uttered. It is not easy to see how such an
approach can deal with the structural, recursive feature of language that is
essential to explaining how new sentences can be understood. But the central
difficulty is that we cannot hope to attach a sense to the attribution of finely
discriminated intentions independently of interpreting speech. The reason is
not that we cannot ask necessary questions, but that interpreting an agent’s
intentions, his beliefs and his words are parts of a single project, no part of
which can be assumed to be complete before the rest is. If this is right, we
cannot make the full panoply of intentions and beliefs the evidential base for
a theory of radical interpretation. (Davidson 1973/2001: 127, my italics)95
The accusation of circularity also plays a role in the debate between ‘hypothetical’ and ‘factual’ intentionalism, though usually without reference to
the discussions in the philosophy of language.96 Interestingly enough,
Black raises the question as to how one can know that a particular intention is present in
an utterance and answers it by quoting Grice: “Grice replies that ‘An utterer is held to intend
to convey what is normally conveyed (or normally intended to be conveyed)’. [Grice 1957:
387] This sounds suspiciously circular, since it amounts to saying that S [= speaker] will
count as intending to mean what the words he uses would normally mean” (Black 1973:
272f.). Black sums up: “In general, Grice’s view puts the semantic cart in front of the horse:
It is not perception of the speaker’s intention to produce certain desired effects in the hearer
that allows a hearer to determine the meaning of what is being said, but, vice versa, detection
of the speaker’s meaning enables a suitably competent hearer, assisted by previous experience, and by interpretation of the given sign produced in the course of this speech transaction, to infer the speaker’s intention” (ibid.: 276).
95
It must, of course, be noted that the theory of interpretation Davidson developed for
natural languages excludes not only intentions, but also meanings. Based as it is on truth
values, it cannot be applied to the interpretation of literary texts, because, as a rule, no truth
values can be attributed to propositions produced in this type of discourse; on this issue, see
Kablitz (2013) and the discussion in Chap. 2.
96
On the accusation of circularity against Stecker (2003, 2006), see Levinson (2010, esp.
p. 146), and Kiefer (2005). Currie’s statement that speakers do not “intend to convey information, but to convey it by communicating […] the intention to communicate” (Currie
2004: 111) is strikingly circular: in order to communicate that one wants to communicate,
one must make a statement the meaning of which explicitly or implicitly expresses this intention—after all, one could also communicate that one does not want to communicate (‘I
don’t want to talk’).
94
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39
Kiefer accuses both hypothetical and factual intentionalism of circular
argumentation:
The general point I would like to make, however, is that both decisions
about hypothetical intentions and conjectures about actual intentions are
reflections of the way we have already interpreted the work in front of us.
(Kiefer 2005: 278)
When Levinson describes utterance meaning, as we have seen, as “the
most plausibly ascribed intention to the utterer” (Levinson 1996: 191, my
italics), then hypothetical intentionalism, too, is ultimately circular,
because hypothetical intentions cannot be located anywhere else than
within the text itself. That means that the crux of hypothetical intentionalism lies in its intentionalist theory of meaning,97 which is difficult to
eschew given the central importance of the adjective ‘hypothetical’ to the
entire approach: as Levinson explains, it is chiefly concerned with the construction of hypotheses regarding the meaning of the text. Yet while hypothetical intentionalism champions an interpretive activity that is geared
more toward “could mean” than toward “does mean”, it does not pursue
a relativist agenda, since its goal is always “the best hypothesis”, the one
that is the most explanatorily plausible and, to a lesser extent, aesthetically
charitable construction we can arrive at […] regarding a work’s intended
import. (Levinson 2002: 310)
If we omit the adjective “intended”—it is simply superfluous, because
“intended import” can only ever be derived from “import”—then
Levinson is implying an interpretive constructivism that greatly resembles
the one that I myself have proposed in Hempfer 1983.98 This form of
97
The litotes Black employed to great effect in his critical response to Grice in New Literary
History still hits the bull’s eye even 30 years later: “It would be optimistic to suppose that lack
of clarity about the foundations of philosophical semantics could have no inimical influence
upon the interpretation of literature” (Black 1973: 258, n.5).
98
The criticism of Tolhurst (1979) and Hempfer (1983/2002) articulated in Spoerhase
(2007) is misdirected, because its author confuses ‘contrafactual’ and ‘potential’, a mistake
that runs through the whole book. The “idealiter possible reception” cannot be a “contrafactual […] construct” (ibid.: 138), precisely because the latter would not be possible.
Contrafactual statements of the type ‘If I hadn’t fallen ill, I would’ve visited you’ presuppose
‘I fell ill, that’s why I didn’t visit you’, and are therefore fundamentally distinct from formulations of a possible state of affairs such as ‘If (= in the event that) I don’t fall ill, I’ll visit you’.
The realiter possible cannot be at the same time ‘unreal’, because then it would be impossible. From a grammatical point of view, irrealis and potentialis are quite unambiguously
different.
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K. W. HEMPFER
constructivism differs fundamentally from the various ‘constructivisms’ as
Stecker describes them (Stecker 2003: 95–152). Regarding what he calls
“historical constructivism”, in particular, Stecker claims that it proceeds
on the assumption that the text’s meaning changes over time (ibid.:
140–146), yet as his examples show, this is nothing other than a reformulation of the New Critics’ thesis of semantic autonomy. In their entirety,
Stecker’s deliberations on the issue of constructivism suffer from his commingling of the object level and the theoretical meta-level: it is not the text
and its discursive presuppositions that change, but rather the theories with
which the latter are modeled.
In contradistinction to Kiefer (2005), who likewise favors a constructivist model of interpretation in his critical engagement with hypothetical
intentionalism, I would like to avoid the latter’s relativism, as I shall sketch
out in my concluding remarks to this chapter.
One does not have to be a hard-boiled intentionalist to assume that the
author wants to communicate something and that this something is not
arbitrary—otherwise, he could have spared himself the trouble of writing
the text in the first place.99 This general intention must be distinguished
from what he has actually communicated, which means that while explicit
authorial intentions can be just as much a part of the arsenal for the elaboration of interpretive hypotheses as statements made by contemporary
recipients, they, too, must be tested against the text and can be falsified in
99
Davidson formulates this even more strictly: “[…] It is a necessary mark of linguistic
action that the speaker or writer intends his words to be interpreted as having a certain meaning” (Davidson 1993: 299, my italics). Fernflores (2010: 69–73) follows suit (in favor of
Davidson and against Roland Barthes). From this understanding of ‘intention’, Davidson
distinguishes “ends or intentions which lie as it were beyond the production of words, ends
that could at least in principle be achieved by nonlinguistic means” (Davidson 1993: 298).
This very broad conception of intention seems to be the basis of the ‘hermeneutic intentionalism’ espoused by Axel Bühler (see Bühler 2007), for whom “the determination of meanings no longer [stands] in the foreground” (Bühler 2005: 470; analogous Bühler 2007:
188), and who explicitly describes his approach as “pyschologistic”: “[I]t [i.e., hermeneutic
intentionalism] views the intentions that are ascribed [zugeschrieben] to authors as real psychic objects, and thus interprets them in a realistic manner” (Bühler 2007: 188). Since one
cannot observe ‘intentions’ directly—they are “ascribed”—the question naturally arises how
these ‘ascriptions’ are made (via meanings?), and how ‘real’ they are given their status as
‘ascriptions’. All told, the question literary scholars ask about the relation between authorial
intention and textual meaning seems almost impossible to answer within the theoretical
framework of ‘hermeneutic intentionalism’, which is why its epistemological difficulties will
not be discussed again here (see Sect. 1.1, pp. 1–4).
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41
the process. Generally speaking, the debate about intentionality was
informed by a much too narrow perception of the role of the author: What
is at stake are not merely his concrete ‘intentions’, but also the indexicalization100 of the text that he enables, thereby providing it with a personal,
spatial, and temporal anchor point. If a text was written by a certain author
at a certain time and in a certain cultural sphere, then we must attribute to
that author a certain textualization competence (Vertextungkompetenz)
that reflects the chronotopically available socio-cultural knowledge that
the individual in question could draw on. For instance, research on a given
author’s education and familiarity (or lack of familiarity) with specific
legal, philosophical, and theological discourses is absolutely relevant to the
interpretation of literary texts, because it can corroborate or disprove possible relationships with other texts and/or discursive and epistemic configurations, depending on whether or not the author was aware of them.
Nevertheless, authorial competence as individual familiarity with what is
writeable and thinkable in a given place and moment must not be identified with textual meaning, because the latter, understood as ‘utterance
meaning’, is a specific, concrete actualization of a more general authorial
competence.
In many cases we cannot, or can only insufficiently, make recourse to an
authorial competence that limits the potentially available presuppositions
of understanding. We may, however, have at our disposal contemporary
documents regarding a text’s reception that make the initial intended
recipients’ presuppositions of understanding explicit, and of course the
texts themselves also provide clues as to which areas of the socio-cultural
system they are referring to. Adequately grasping these hints is the crux of
any theory of interpretation, insofar as the interpreter’s ‘knowing how’ is
of central importance here. For the latter to recognize the relevant textual
clues, what is required is a comprehensive knowledge ranging from the
encyclopedic to the systemic, that is, familiarity with a broad variety of
texts, genres, and discursive traditions in diverse socio-cultural subsystems. In addition to an adequate grasp of the textual evidence itself, it is
crucial for interpretations to link texts to the referential frameworks to
which they are in fact related—if the wrong systems of reference (for
instance, anachronistic ones) are chosen, even the most accurate observations regarding the text as such are invalidated by the incongruous frame
100
On the concept of indexicality, see Hempfer/Traninger (2007: 12–15).
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42
K. W. HEMPFER
of reference.101 While a ‘conflict of interpretations’ may certainly spring
from a focus on different ‘textual data’, the application of different referential frameworks is at least as important a factor. What is needed in order
to arrive at an adequate correlation of the plethora of data regarding both
the text itself and its literary and non-literary systems of reference is, in
Davidson’s above-quoted words, “intuition, luck, and skill” accompanied
by “taste and sympathy”102—qualities that seem to me far from omnipresent among interpreters, even in the form of ‘intentions’.
To summarize: current theories of interpretation privilege either the
relation between author and text or that between text and reader. The task
of an adequate theory of interpretation is the analysis of the complete
process of interpretation that takes place between the author and the
intended reader by means of the text. The text is indexicalized through the
author, which means that its semantic range is historically limited: while
the author can modify contemporary presuppositions of understanding,
he cannot communicate with his readers outside of them. The interpreter’s task is to construct, on the basis of textual clues and under critical
consideration of his knowledge of the author’s textualization competence
as well as of the actual reception(s) of the text, a textual meaning that
models the reception that would have been possible under ideal historical
circumstances without necessarily being identical with any actual instance
of reception. The meaning of the text is thus identical neither with authorial intention or competence (however defined), nor with actual instances
of reception; rather, the reconstruction of the text’s conditions of production and reception pursues, qua theory of interpretation,103 the goal of
historicizing the theoretical framework on the basis of which the hypothetical construction of textual meaning is undertaken. This construction
is anything but arbitrary, because it is based first on the specific linguistic
organization of the text, from syntax to semantics and pragmatics,104 and
second on the way the individual text is related to the respective period’s
A paradigmatic example of this are Spitzer’s studies on Racine; see Hempfer (2014a).
See Sect. 1.2, p. 13.
103
Study of the production and reception of texts can, of course, serve entirely different
purposes, such as empirical reader research, a sociological or psychological typology of
authors and readers, or the reconstruction of the social role of authors.
104
From a linguistic perspective, Fix (2015) emphatically points out that in the case of
interpretation, what matters is “what is immanent in the word and in the text”, and “which
reception performances [Rezeptionsleistungen] texts ‘prompt’ on the basis of their respective
structures of meaning” (p. 114).
101
102
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1 INTERPRETATION
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general orders of discourse and knowledge.105 The validity of interpretations is consequently measured by (a) the adequacy of observations regarding the text, (b) the anachronism-free relating of textual data and general
orders of discourse and knowledge, as well as (c) the argumentative rigor
with which (a) and (b) are presented.106 Given the fact that highly diverse
phenomena must be concurrently grasped and connected, and that every
new interpretation necessarily inscribes itself into the agon of already available interpretations, these principles do not abolish the conflict of interpretations, but rather put it on a rational basis: every new interpretation is
subject to the postulate of ‘wanting to better understand the text’, and is
to be judged according to its fulfillment of that postulate. Of course, this
is not to say that the history of literary interpretation can be reconstructed
as a linear process in which our understanding of literary texts has continuously and objectively improved107—we can, however, conceptualize it as a
process driven by the desire to better understand the text, one that is just
as likely to fail as it is to succeed.108 If, on the other hand, one seeks not to
understand better, but simply differently, one violates the principle of relevance on which every form of communication is predicated (Sperber/
Wilson 1995).
In recent years, the theory of interpretation has unquestionably achieved
a level of reflective sophistication that it did not possess at the beginning
of the last century. This also holds, of course, for the so-called praxeological turn of interpretation theory. Scholarly practice, meanwhile, has not
fully kept abreast of this development—indeed, especially in the context of
105
For an analogous argument in favor of the interdependence of the object level and the
analytical meta-level, see Martus (2015: 28), who in turn draws on Rheinberger (1997).
106
Understanding interpretation in terms of a theory of action that conceives of the practice
as the result of concatenated acts of interpretation based on methodological ‘preferences’ cannot, in my opinion, serve as an evaluative benchmark in the absence of a mechanism to validate
said ‘preferences’ (Dennerlein et al. 2008)—if the ‘preferences’ are false, then so are the ensuing ‘acts of interpretation’, regardless of their internal stringency. See Sect. 1.3, pp. 16f.
107
A linear history of the progress of hermeneutics that ultimately finds its crowning conclusion in the ‘theory of mind’ is narrated by Detel (2011: 471–502). In contrast, Kindt
(2016) defends a more narrow concept of progress on the basis of a non-relativistic reading
of Kuhn and concludes: “Is there progress in the field of literary interpretation? Yes, but only
sometimes, in a few areas” (p. 36).
108
Here, I am obviously not concerned with the hermeneutic maxim of ‘understanding
better’ that is outlined in Danneberg (2003) and that served as the starting point for the
intentionality debate—in effect, the problem that it sought to solve is rendered obsolete by
the separation of authorial intention and textual meaning. On the non-arbitrary nature of the
interpretive history of texts, see also Mantzavinos (2014, esp. p. 50f. and n.9).
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K. W. HEMPFER
deconstruction as well as gender and other ‘studies’, a striking arbitrariness is frequently in evidence. This points to the conclusion that the normative distinction between ‘good’ and ‘less good’ interpretive practice is
inevitable, since only the former can contain the ‘knowing how’ that praxeological theory seeks to translate—even if only partially—into a propositional ‘knowing that’. With my five maxims I have tried to sketch out the
foundations of such ‘good’ practice.
1.5 Pertinent Works on the Theory
of Interpretation
Abel (1988)
Abel (1995)
Abel (2004)
Abel (2010)
Assmann (1996)
Barthes (1963)
Barthes (1970)
Barthes (1974)
Barthes (2002)
Beardsley (1968)
Black (1973)
Bollack (2000)
Borkowski et al. (ed.) (2015)
Bühler (2003)
Bühler (2005)
Bühler (2007)
Caracciolo (2016)
Conrady (1974)
Currie (2004)
Danneberg (1999)
Danneberg (2003)
Davidson (1973/2001)
Dennerlein et al. (2008)
Descher et al. (2015)
Detel (2011)
Dutt (ed.) (2012)
Eco (1979)
Eco (1990)
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Fernflores (2010)
Fix (2015)
Føllesdal et al. (1977/2008)
Freundlieb (1980)
Freundlieb (1992)
Gadamer (21965)
Gadamer (22004)
Göttner (1973)
Göttner/Jacobs (1978)
Grice (1957)
Hancher (1981)
Hempfer (1983)
Hempfer (1999/2002)
Hempfer (2009)
Hiebel (2017)
Hirsch (1967)
Irvin (2006)
Kiefer (2005)
Kindt (2016)
Kindt/Köppe (ed.) (2008)
Lenk (1993)
Levinson (2002)
Levinson (2010)
Limpinsel (2013)
Martus (2015)
Martus/Spoerhase (2009)
Olsen (2004)
Pettersson (2009)
Pommier (1988)
Reemtsma (2016)
Schalk (2000)
Schlesier (2003)
Schmidt (1979/2008)
Scholz (2013)
Sellars (1953/1980)
Sontag (1966)
Spoerhase (2007)
Staiger (1951/2008)
Stecker (2003)
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46
K. W. HEMPFER
Stecker (2006)
Strube (2000)
Titzmann (1977)
Titzmann (2013)
Tolhurst (1979)
Weimar (2002)
Weimar (2005)
Wellbery (1996)
Willand (2016)
Wimsatt (1954/1970)
Wimsatt (1968)
Winko (2002)
Winko/Jannidis (2015)
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