Works, Texts and Interpretation

This project deals with a couple of closely interrelated questions concerning the ontology of literary works, texts, and meaning and the nature of literary interpretation. One of the major aims is a clarification of the concept of a text from an ontological point of view. At the centre of the project are the following questions: What kind of entity is a text? What are the identity conditions for texts? What is the relationship between a literary work and its text? In contemporary literary theory, there is a widespread conceptual distinction between the concept of a literary work and the concept of a text. Some theorists assume that a literary work has to be distinguished from its text, others claim, to the contrary, that a literary work is identical with its text. An example that is discussed over and over again is Jorge Louis Borges`s story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". The content of the story is usually described as follows: Pierre Menard, a citizen of the 20th century, writes down the text of Cervantes`s Don Quixote, but - due to the differences of the cultural and historical contexts of Menard and Cervantes - what he has in mind while he is doing this is something clearly different from what Cervantes had in mind while he wrote his work. Some theorists argue that Menard has created a new work, although the text of his work is identical with the text of Cervantes`s work. Others deny that Menard has created a new work, because of the identity of Menard`s text with Cervantes`s. However, due to the lack of identity conditions for texts, it is not even clear whether Menard`s text is really identical with Cervantes`s text. Suppose that certain words that occur in Cervantes`s text had another meaning in the 16th century than in the 20th. Is then Menard`s text identical with Cervantes`s? One of the questions underlying this discussion is whether texts (or works) have any objective and fixed meaning at all (prior to any interpretive efforts of recipients), which should be reconstructed through interpretation, or whether meaning is a product of interpretation. If there is such a thing as an objective meaning of a work or text, the question arises of what constitutes the objective meaning: the actual intentions of the author(s) or linguistic conventions, or something else?

The central question of the project was, very generally put: Can interpretation hypotheses be true or false, and if so, under what conditions is an interpretation hypothesis true or false? In this general formulation, this is a fundamental question of all humanities and cultural sciences. However, the topic of this project was the interpretation of literary texts in particular, especially the interpretation of fictional literary texts. In this particular version, the question is a fundamental question of all literary studies. This question draws its relevance, among other things, from a debate which was instigated in the late sixties by Roland Barthes` thesis from the "death of the author" and which flared up again recently. The thesis from the death of the author says, in its most radical form, that texts do not have any meaning independently from concrete readings, in particular that they do not have any meaning which has been determined by the authors. According to this thesis, texts are mere "props", as it were, for the generation of meanings in the heads of the readers. Obviously, in light of this position, it does not make sense to ask questions about the truth or rightness of an interpretation. For truth is, loosely speaking, "correspondence with reality". Accordingly, an interpretation hypothesis would be true or right, respectively, if it corresponded to the factual, objectively existent meaning of the text, where "exists objectively" means "exists independently from readers". But if there is no such thing as an objective meaning, then interpretations may be at most more or less original, fruitful, intersubjectively comprehensible, and the like, but not true or false. It becomes obvious already from this formulation of the problem that an answer to the question about the objective rightness of interpretations depends ultimately upon answers to ontological questions, that is, to questions which concern, among other things, the existence and the essential properties of certain kinds of objects. In this particular case, the question may be put as follows: Which kind of objects are texts on the one hand and (literary) works on the other? In particular, does the existence of texts and (literary) works imply the existence of objective meanings? The result of the project is, very briefly put, that a text is more than a mere configuration of sounds or inscriptions made of ink or stone or whatever. A text is a complex of signs with a particular conventional meaning in a particular language. Already at this basic level authors`s intentions come into play. For it depends on the author`s intentions whether a certain object is, for instance, a series of words in English, or in German, or in another language. A (literary) work, in its turn, is a complex object, consisting of a text (in the sense just explicated) as well as of a "represented world" and a further component which might be called the "layer of intended meaning experiences".