Interpretive Communities Theory

Development of Interpretive Community Theory

Interpretive community theory is of fairly recent origin, although its epistemological roots extend back more than 100 years. The basic idea of the interpretive community is foreshadowed in the work of the American pragmatist and semiotician Charles Sanders Pierce, who argued that public knowledge arises out of the discursive practices of communities of inquiry. The hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey, Paul Ricoeur, and Hans-Georg Gadamer contributed a method for studying the active, contextualized nature of textual interpretation, while the work of the linguistic theorists Valentin Volosinov and Mikhail Bakhtin stressed the polysemic (characterized by many meanings) and dialogic nature of language in social usage. Meanwhile, several strains of the constructivist movement during the mid-20th century—among them social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology—forwarded the view that reality is a social construction that takes variable forms and is created through processes of face-to-face interaction. Toward the end of the century, belief in the stability of texts and historical metanarratives was questioned by poststructuralist philosophers who argued that knowledge is created through the contingencies of power and discourse. Similarly, in literary studies, the deconstructionist and reader-response (or reception) camps promoted the role of the reader-as-subject in bringing textual meanings to life. These latter developments set the stage for the literary theorist Stanley Fish to coin the term interpretive community.

In his volume of essays Is There a Text in This Class? Fish proposed that a text is meaningless—mere ink marks on paper—without readers to engage it. Other reader-response theorists said much the same thing, but most of them located the mechanisms for meaning making in psychological explanations. Stanley Fish's formulation was set apart by its emphasis on the social world of readers. He argued that the interpretive strategies that a reader deploys in the act of reading—indeed, the strategies for deciding what counts as a text of a certain kind—existed long before the reader encountered the text. Furthermore, these strategies are not the property of an individual but of a social community of readers. Through networks of discourse, new members are socialized into the cultural presuppositions for reading and evaluating texts, as well as the specific rules for how to read a text competently. Importantly, members also learn the rules for debating the value of an interpretation; such debates can be fruitful for signaling the core values of a community, clarifying the range of coherent readings, or indicating new ways of reading. However, any serious disagreements that emerge about what a text means—or about what constitutes a text—can be evidence of different interpretive communities. Therefore, what we conventionally think of as the act of reading a [Page 555]work of literature is actually an act of “writing” it—creating and shaping its contours of meaning—and the strategies that enable these achievements are produced by the social entity called an interpretive community. A textual reading is judged right or wrong, worthy or unworthy, by the standards of this community. Other communities may have very different aesthetic or ideological commitments and thus abide by different standards for interpreting the same work.

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