Meaning in LiteratureI. AUTHOR— Interpret author’s intended meaning bya)Readi

Meaning in Literature
Good morning, everyone. Today, we are going to talk about "meaning" in literature. "Meaning" is a difficult issue, and what I have to say today only scratches the surface of a complex and contested area. How do we know what a work of literature is "supposed" to mean, or what its "real" meaning is? There are three ways to approach this: that meaning is what is intended by the author; that meaning is created by and contained in the text itself; and that meaning is created by the reader.
First of all, about the author. Does a work of literature mean what the author "intended" it to mean, and if so, how can we tell? If all the evidence we have is the text itself, we can only speculate on what the priorities and ideas of the author were from our set of interpretive practices and values. We can expand this:
[1]by reading other works by the same author,
    by knowing more and more about what sort of meanings seem to be common to works in that particular tradition, time and genre,
    by knowing how the author and other writers and readers of that time read texts—what their interpretive practices were, and
[2]by knowing what the cultural values and symbols of the time were.
Any person or text can only "mean" within a set of preexisting, socially supported ideas, symbols, images, ways of thinking and values. In a sense there is no such thing as a "personal" meaning; although we have different experiences in our lives and different temperaments and interests,[3]we will interpret the world according to social norms and cultural meanings—there’s no other way to do it.
We may have as evidence for meaning what the author said or wrote about the work, but this is not always reliable. Authorial intention is complicated not only by the fact that an author’s ways of meaning and of using literary conventions are cultural, but by the facts that the author’s work may very well have taken in directions she did not originally foresee and[4]have developed meanings which she did not intend and indeed may not recognize. The works may embody cultural or symbolic meanings which are not fully clear to the author herself and may emerge only through historical or other cultural perspective,[5]and persons may not be conscious of all of the motives that attend their work.
Secondly, about the text. Does the meaning exist "in" the text?[6]There is an argument that the formal properties of the text—[7]the grammar, the language, the uses of image and so forth—contain and produce the meaning, so that any educated reader will inevitably come to essentially the same interpretation as any other. Of course, it becomes almost impossible to know whether the same interpretations are arrived at because the formal properties securely encode the meaning, or because all of the "competent" readers were taught to read the formal properties of texts in roughly the same way. As a text is in a sense only ink marks on a page, and as all meanings are culturally created and transferred, the argument that the meaning is "in" the text is not a particularly persuasive one.
[8]The meaning might be more likely to be in the conventions of meaning, the traditions, the cultural codes which have been handed down, so that insofar as we and other readers might be said to agree on the meaning of the text,[9]that agreement would be created by common traditions and conventions of usage, practice and interpretation. In different time periods, with different cultural perspectives, or with different purposes for reading, no matter what the distance in time or cultural situation, competent readers can arrive at different readings of texts.[10]On the one hand, a text is a historical document, a material fact, and on the other hand, meaning is inevitably cultural and contextual. Therefore, the question of whether the text "really means" what it means to a particular reader, group or tradition can be a difficult and complex one.
Finally, about the reader. Does the meaning then exist in the reader’s response, her processing or reception of the text? In a sense this is inescapable: meaning exists only insofar as it means to someone, and art is composed in order to evoke sets of responses in the reader. But this leads us to three essential issues.
Meaning is "social", that is,[11]language and conventions work only as shared meaning, and our way of viewing the world can exist only as shared. When we read a text, we are participating in social, or cultural, meaning.[12]Response is not merely an individual thing, but is part of culture and history.
Meaning is contextual. Change the context, you often change the meaning. Texts constructed as literature or art, have their own codes and practices, and the more we know of them, the more we can decode the text, that is, understand it—[13]consequently, in regard to the question of meaning there is the matter of reader competency, as it is called, the experience and knowledge of decoding literary texts.
As meanings are cultural and as art is artifact, you may see that this idea that meaning requires competency in reading can bring us back to different conventions and ways of reading and writing,[14]and to the historically situated understandings of the section on the author.[15]At the least, "meaning" requires a negotiation between cultural meanings across time, culture, gender and class.
OK Let me recap my talk today. The point of this brief talk is that "meaning" is a phenomenon that is not easily ascribed or located, that it is historical, social, and derived from the traditions of reading and thinking and understanding the world that you are educated about and socialized in.