Must an interpretation attempt to explain the whole text or can an interpretation subsist merely on a selection from the text?
This question was begotten by a remarkable lack of clarification and specification as to what interpretation really is. More specifically, however, it was class discussion that really rendered necessary this inquiry. In objection to the hypothesis of an infinite number of perspectives from which to describe a pencil, someone said "well that would be describing a part of the pencil, not all of it." I wonder, though, if that is a reasonable distinction to make. If I were to say: "The cover of our textbook is teal." have I not described our textbook? Certainly a comprehensive description would go on to note that there are other colors, a certain number of pages...etc... The point is, though, that I did describe the textbook while describing only a part of it. Comprehensive interpretations may exist, though ambitious, but most interpretations are, I think, interpretations of parts of literary works.
I agree that most interpretations of literary works only address parts or aspects of the works. In addition to this, I was wondering about the possibility of, rather than simply focusing on one part or aspect of a work, intentionally isolating a particular section or chapter and interpreting it independently of the rest of the text. If the chapter interpretation contradicted something found in the rest of the text, it would still be valid, because it was an interpretation of only that one chapter, set apart from the rest of the work.
ReplyDeleteThis idea would certainly create a much wider range of possible interpretations, but I wonder if it actually has value; simply creating more interpretations has no worth if the interpretations are worthless. Would interpreting individual chapters differently from in the context of a work taken as a whole actually be a good thing?
I think that it could be. Sometimes, a work contains chapters which seem at odds with the rest of the work, whether this is a result of the author making a stylistic choice or of mere bad writing. These chapters, if taken alone as something like short stories in their own rights, may yield unique and valuable interpretations which could not exist in the context of the greater work. While I do not think that interpreting separated pieces of a text is more valuable than interpreting the text as a whole, I do think that it can be useful in some situations.
P.S. I also posted this on my blog if you'd rather read it there.