The Act of Interpretation
The recognition of children's ability to interpret texts has been
informed by literary theory, which challenges traditional concepts of author
and reader. One way of viewing literature is to see the author as creator of a
text and the reader as a passive recipient of the meaning. Many student
teachers when asked to write their reading 'histories', look back on their own
studies of literature in secondary education as focusing on learning the
expected interpretation of a 'classic' text. They often, though not always,
claim to have found this approach intimidating and may talk about the barriers
created between themselves and literary texts, whose understanding they saw as
beyond them. However, the idea that the text contains a fixed meaning created
by the author does not reflect adequately the realities of what happens when we
engage with a text. It is widely accepted that meaning does not lie exclusively
within the text but is created in the interaction between author, text and
reader. Louise Rosenblatt (1978) argues that when a reader encounters a text,
the new meanings that are generated are greater than those intrinsic to the
text or indeed the reader's previous understandings. Importantly, in such
transactional theories of reading, the reader is an active participant in the
process of making meaning.
Certainly the author may write with an 'implied reader' in mind,
(Iser, 1978 p. 200), however, the 'real reader' brings to the text a set of
cultural and social expectations and previous knowledge and experience which is
very individual and which may lead to different interpretations of the text.
The more the reader's experience and culture differs from the author's,
the greater the potential divergence in the sense made of the text. Vygotsky
(1978) argues that in engaging with higher psychological processes, as we are
when reading, we draw on our 'socio-cultural origins' (p. 46.) This bringing of
prior knowledge and socio-cultural experience to text becomes particularly
apparent when we re-read stories we remember reading as children. While some
may read familiarly there may be other texts that we are unable to read with
the joyous abandon experienced in childhood. Student teachers often recall this
experience when for example describing their rereading of a favourite Enid
Blyton story; the delight they experienced as children cannot be recaptured.
In The Limits of Interpretation (1994) Umberto Eco, challenges the
view that a text can have infinite meanings. Texts are, he argues, open to
indefinite, but by no means infinite, interpretations allowed by context:
To recognize this
principle does not mean to support the 'repressive' idea that a text has a
unique meaning guaranteed by some interpretive authority. It means on the
contrary, that any act of interpretation is a dialectic between openness and
form, initiative on the part of the interpreter and contextual pressure. (
p.21)
While
a text has unlimited personal significance, interpretation is constrained by
features within the text. Culler (1981) suggests that the term 'making sense'
is preferable to 'meaning', as meaning suggests 'a property of text', whereas
'making sense' implies the reader's active engagement with the text, and 'links
the qualities of a text to the operations one performs on it' (p. 50).
