I’ve watched a video essay on the over-analysis of films lately which really got me thinking about the extent to which people/critics ‘overanalyze’ some parts/aspects of literature in particular, like seeing/interpreting meaning in something when it was explicitly not intended to be there. I’d love to hear what you think about it!!
I’m going to leave Umberto Eco take this one for me, shall I ? I entirely agree with his Limits of Interpretation (1990) :
The text is a system, and as system it has necessary constraints.
“A text is a place where the irreducible polysemy of symbols is in fact reduced because in a text symbols are anchored to their context. The medieval interpreters were right: one should look for the rules which allow a contextual disambiguation of the exaggerated fecundity of symbols. […]
Any act of interpretation is a dialectic between openness and form, initiative on the part of the interpreter and contextual pressure.”
The reader is free to interpret, but this freedom does not deny the existence of the interpreted product (and its natural limits) :
“The aesthetics of reception maintains that a literary work is enriched by the various interpretations it underwent along the centuries […] and does not deny that every interpretation can and must be compared with the textual object and with the intention operis.”
“To critically interpret a text means to read it in order to discover, along with our reactions to it, something about its nature.”
“Any act of freedom on the part of the reader can come after, not before, the acceptance of the literal meaning of lexical [and more] items’ constraint.”
I’d like to thank Umberto and my obsession with Reader Response Theory for this very lazy exposé.
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