49. Major paradigms of literary text interpretation.

Scholarly approaches to text interpretation can be roughly divided by the ctiterion of preference given to one of the textual senses, i.e. universal, the author's or the reader's sense. Accordingly, we can distinguish the following trends, or paradigms of literary text interpretation from ancient times to the 70-80s of the 20th C., when they achieved a definite form:

1) objectivist paradigm: treats the sense attributed to the text by its author as objective and explicable, thus being the major purpose of research;

2) subjectivist paradigm: literary text interpretation is not determined by the text itself but relies completely on its readers' perspectives;

3) balanced, or rational paradigm: proceeds from the assumption that the sense of literary text can be elicited from the dialogue between the text and the reader.

The German philisopher Hans-Georg Gadamer formulated 2 basic assumptions of interpretation: 1) interpretation is, principally, open and infinite; 2) text comprehension is inseparable from the interpreter's self-understanding

50. Hermeneutic, logical, psychological perspectives of the literary text interpretation.

The hermeneutic prospective, (focuses on the reader's perception) followed by Umberto Eco, among other scholars, advocates the active role of the interpreter and an "open-ended reading", i.e. potentially unlimited elucidation of a text. The radical hermeneutic approach falls under the subjectivist trend of interpretation, finding the reader's sense of a text to be only valid one and discarding the author's intention. Eco abides by the rational paradigm by trying to reconcile the objectivist and subjectivist trends with his "third possibility" - looking for an "intention of the text".

The psychological (psychoanalytical) perspective (focuses on the author's perception) is based upon the Freudian and Jungian treatment of the literary text as a form of sublimation of the writer's subconscious, primarily sexual, desires and archetypal images. Using this approach, an interpreter looks for hidden connections between the writer's style and his/her phsychological traits. This perspective complies with the main postulates of the objectivist paradigm.

The philological perspective intergrates linguostylistic and literary stylistic approaches to the analysis of fiction. The goal of this interpretation is to decode both the author's and reader's senses of a fictional text through the study of the text genesis and its impact upon the reader. This perspective is a crossroads where different interpretative paradigms converge.

The pragmatic perspective of the literary text interpretation is aimed at the exloration of implied relationships between the author and the adressee; in other terms, the author's expectations about the reader and his/her literary response. This perspective belongs to the rational paradigm.

The allegoric-symbolic perspective treats the literary text as an ambigouos (twofold) construction that conceals hidden ("dark", obscure) senses under the cover of its images.