Interpretation

It may come as a surprise, but interpretation is by no means one of the self-evident fundamentals of literary theory—indeed, it has been the target of harsh polemics, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. I shall therefore first situate literary interpretation in a general epistemological framework in order to demonstrate its fundamental inevitability. In a second step, literary interpretation will be characterized as a ‘knowing how’ that cannot be translated entirely into a ‘knowing that’, that is, into a certain number of rules of interpretation. I will then more precisely define this ‘knowing how’ as argumentation in the sense of Aristotelian topics and, following Brandom, as a matter of making the implicit explicit. In conclusion, I will summarize my basic assumptions in the form of seven theses, from which five maxims follow that seek to reestablish the practice of interpretation as a rational agon against relativistic positions.