Textual studies…

Can you tell that I’m catching up on four weeks of blogs I haven’t had time to read yet?

Anyway, here's a really fascinating reflection on textual studies, with an interesting take on reading, interpretation and criticism:

"Reading
Scholes sees reading as the production of text within text. It’s the largely unconscious process we use to access the author’s message. While reading, we engage the generic and cultural codes used by the author. Vocabulary knowledge, discussion, description, and background knowledge all contribute to a reader’s ability to construct a text by entering the author’s world.

Interpretation
Interpretation is the production of text upon text, and Scholes see this activity as dependent upon breakdowns in communication. When we perceive a message as somehow incomplete, we employ “fix-up” strategies to help us make sense. Scholes notes that we’re motivated toward interpretive activity by “either some excess of meaning in a text or of some deficiency of knowledge in the reader (p. 22).” The impulse to understand, to look for meaning, is basic to literary analysis.

Criticism
The production of text against text happens when we believe that a work has not lived up to its intended purpose. Criticism springs from an interest that is not just simply personal, but which is rooted in particular social texts with which a reader/critic may feel a close affinity. Scholes observes that criticism is in some ways the reverse of interpretation, since it comes about when the reader brings an “excess” of meaning to the text, and the text is judged somehow deficient."

So what does that mean in relation to biblical texts? Perhaps we ought to add a first category prior to reading that's "listening" -- something about hearing the story before it's text, heard within a community. And then interpretation, in this take, makes as we try to "make sense" of the biblical narrative -- and would also explain why certain folk of a more fundamentalist strain are so opposed to any kind of interpretation. Then criticism occurs precisely because "we believe that a work has not lived up to its intended purpose." Certainly feminist criticism that has retrieval as some part of its goal would fit in that category.

In any case, a nice big hmmmmm....