Meaning
This page’s contents are highly controversial in most academic settings, especially within departments of English. While I was at ACU, professors strongly promoted the more liberal view outlined below.
Within the history of interpretation, most of the emphasis has been on attempting to discover the meaning that an author intended to convey to us. At some point in the early 1900s, the emphasis shifted to the text itself, and it was said that the meaning resided in the text rather than in the author’s intention. Authorial intent is hard to get at, after all, once the author is dead and can no longer say exactly what he or she meant. So, to get at “meaning,” we were told to examine the artifact of the text, which is all that the reader actually has access to. But then another shift occurred.
To the modern professor of literature, the reader is more relevant in determining meaning than the text or the author. With Reader-Response Criticism, at least in its more radical forms, the focus is on the meaning that is generated by the reader. The reader-response theorist emphasizes that the way in which a reader approaches a text (which we will talk about in our next section) affects the meaning that the reader derives from it. Thus, they conclude, the meaning resides in the reader and not in the text. This is a bit of an over-simplification, but the sum of it is that such theories are generally self-refuting. Academics who write books on reader-response have specific meanings they intend to convey, and they would tell readers who find wildly varied understandings that not all readings are equally valid. A balanced and thorough analysis of these issues is given in chapter three of “Introduction to Biblical Interpretation” by Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard (see the Resources page).
Basically, the role of meaning I endorse as correct is that the author’s intention is expressed in the content of a text. The meaning we seek is found in the overall argument of the text, also known as its “generic conception” (see Validity in Interpretation by E. D. Hirsch on this). Meaning comes from the top down. This will be discussed more in the next section.