Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose (Book review)

Abstract

Debates concerning methodological issues in literary interpretation may not be at the forefront of current thinking in literary studies, but if this is so it is by no means because the issues have been satisfactorily resolved. They clearly have not. None the less, there seems to be a majority view, whether it is based on assumptions built into various forms of neopragmatist reader-response criticism, deconstructionist criticism, or a criticism influenced by philosophical hermeneutics, that literary texts are open to innumerable different interpretations and that anything like a reasonably strict methodology for interpretation as envisaged, for example, by E. D. Hirsch in his Validity in Interpretation in the late sixties, is perhaps neither possible nor desirable. Ever since Roland Barthes's dictum in his essay 'The death of the author' that to insist on a univocal reading is to invoke the authoritarian figures of God and the Law, literary critics and critical theorists have been reluctant to suggest that the emancipation from the constraints of reading advocated by Barthes might not have been the kind of revolutionary act Barthes deluded himself into thinking it was. The euphoria of interpretative liberation embodied in Barthes's 1970s radicality prevented (and still prevents) many from recognizing the silliness of some of Barthes's pronouncements. But the times are changing, and it is certainly to be welcomed that someone of the stature and international standing of Umberto Eco, both as a theorist and a creative writer, has made a significant contribution to the reopening of the question of methodological standards and criteria of literary interpretation in his three Tanner Lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1990 in front of a very large audience. The three lectures, in a slightly revised form, have now been published by Cambridge University Press, together with one essay each by Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose as contributing seminarists. Also included in the volume is a substantive and very useful introductory piece by the editor Stefan Collini and a relatively short reply to the seminarists' essays by Eco.