A Critical Matrix
	Expanding the Interpretive Space
	(Revised December 22, 1996)

• Introduction
• The Fictional Perspective
• The Author's Intention
• The Reader's Response

Introduction

The locus of literary meaning has variously been taken to be the author's intention, the reader's response, and the text itself (cf. Hernadi 1995). In a cognitive perspective, it makes little sense to locate the kind of meaning accessible to human readers exclusively in the text itself, since the very act of abstracting the text as an isolable object is dependent on a cognitive act of framing. To speak about a text is already to place it in the human world; to access its symbolic meaning is possible only through a series of complex cognitive acts.

The meaning that should properly be attributed to the author, however, cannot be equated with his conscious intentions; since major aspects of meaning-making are cognitively impenetrable, the author can never have conscious or reflective knowledge of the full complexity of what he is communicating. An analysis of meaning focusing on the author may consider several different interacting levels of creativity and constraints, and these will not be exhaustible.

Since the reader, just as the writer, depends on multilayered interpretive processes that are far from cognitively transparent, the complexity of the reader's response will also be a significant factor of interest. In the normal course of things, the use of a text--readers' interpretations--may become more significant than the author's meaning, when persistent misreadings, or simply emphases or biases, take on their own cultural life.

Within these two sets of cognitive acts, the fictional world can emerge--a framed world to which is applied the whole range of inferences that apply to the real world.

In sum, literary meaning may be seen to involve accepting the perspective of the fictional world (suspending disbelief), making hypotheses about the author's intentions (not in principle any less knowable than any other object of knowledge), and about relevant readers' responses--including one's own (this is no more than what any author does as a matter of course).

These perspectives in turn map onto three broad modes of construal: the personal, the socio-historical, and the natural, rougly nested. The personal is the domain of folk psychology, a rich mode of construal that gain us initial access to the text; the socio-historical contextualizes the personal in the domain of cumulative cultural information; the natural further situates the personal and the cultural in cognitive structures that emerge out of the semiotic processes of life. The current disregard for the cognitive or natural dimension leads to a failure to appreciate the major themes of literature, and thus quite frequently to a denial of the meanings that is still available to the naive reader. Cognitive Culture Theory should be utilized to deepen the understanding reached by folk psychology and historical research, as a complement to rather than a substitute for current work. Since the claims of cultural constructionism tend to be totalizing, however, the cognitive approach may serve as a corrective.

The third dimension is given by three central concerns of literary understanding, the meaning, the method, and the motive: 
 
 

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