The debate about validity in interpretation has pitted monism against pluralism. Some theorists insist that any literary work has a single, determinate meaning, and others argue that there are no limits to the readings a text allows. Neither view adequately describes the field of conflicting interpretations. Critics can and do have legitimate disagreements about literary works; yet we can also say that some readings are wrong, not simply different. The hermeneutic field is divided among conflicting systems of interpretation, each based on different presuppositions that decide what its procedures will disclose and what they will disguise. But several tests for validity–inclusiveness, efficacy, and intersubjectivity– act as constraints on reading and regulate claims to legitimacy. While these tests have limitations that prevent them from resolving all hermeneutic disagreements, literary criticism is nevertheless a rational, disciplined enterprise– though an inherently pluralistic one.

Much of Kafka's fiction exploits language whose performative status is ambiguous–language that Paul de Man calls “rhetorical”–to generate a peculiar and characteristic narrative “space” in which Kafka's stories operate. Speech-act theory helps to clarify the way in which problems arising from language become the central problems that Kafka's characters face. In particular, the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions provides an analytic tool that reveals Kafka's abiding concern with the “gap,” or “aporia,” produced by assertions, requests, commands, and other illocutionary acts that turn out not to assert, request, or command anything the reader or listener can pin down. This tool helps us discover the linguistic sources for the bewilderment and anxiety that characterize Kafka's fictional world.

Writing shortly after Brazil declared its independence from Portugal, Jose de Alencar considered that one of his major tasks was to help formulate a new definition of Brazilian nationality that would be distinct from, but equal in value to, the inevitable European models. Alencar uses some of the stereotypes of European romantic fiction to differentiate the American nation from others. His works, in their subject and in their stance toward Brazilian history and society, reproduce and confirm not only the prevailing national ideologies but also the inherent and characteristic contradictions of those ideologies. Alencar's “Indian” novels–O Guarani, Iracema, and Ubirajara–not only affirm the possibility and the value of the harmonious mingling of the cultures making up the new nation but also show that such harmony is not attainable in the terms in which it is posited. By validating national ideals and following them to their contradictions, Alencar's works show themselves to be firmly embedded in the fabric of Brazilian culture.

Few modernist short narratives achieve the richness of Robert Musil's novella “Die Amsel” (1928). The work's autobiographical elements fragment into different narrative voices whose origins remain undetermined, thus giving the writing subject latitude to participate in the ironic spectacle that he is creating. After years of silence about three decisive experiences in his life, A2, a wise fool, tells his childhood stories to his childhood friend A1 in such a way that the truth of the stories cannot be fixed and their meaning is suspended in the ongoing process of the telling. Like Ulrich, Musil's “man without qualities,” A2 has a basic need for openness and spontaneity, and his stories, with their sardonic and selfparodic accents, are playful exercises in fluid, hypothetical discourse. The blackbird that reappears in A2's third tale is the product of A2's verbal jesting at the expense of the all too serious and literal-minded A1.

Ralph Ellison's critical formulations often suggest a radical dichotomy between lived experience and artistic representation. This dichotomy entails such antinomies in his critical canon as social and artistic, folklore and literature. Yet in the Trueblood episode of his novel Invisible Man literary art does not comprehensively transcend folklore. This episode, in fact, provides a metaexpressive commentary in which an agrarian folk storyteller par excellence inversively parodies Freudian and Christian myths and Anglo-American economic, philanthropic, and psychosocial practices. Trueblood emerges as a mediating blues site reconciling seemingly fixed distinctions between commercial and creative dimensions of Afro-American expression. The folk character's crafty realization reveals Ellison's Afro-American genius in brilliantly reflexive ways.

Although critics have largely overlooked the literary properties of The Subjection of Women, the essay's effectiveness as theory is inseparable from its poetic dimension. To persuade an unsympathetic audience of a radically subversive thesis, Mill weaves into his argument a poetic subtext modeled on the preeminent mythos of the Western world, the biblical account of history from the fall to paradise. At the same time, aware that Scripture has historically been used to authorize patriarchal values, he exploits the self-critical impulse inherent in biblical hermeneutic traditions, formulating a thematics of language, writing, and interpretation that allows him to turn patriarchal discourse against itself. He dismantles the very myth he employs in order to remake it as a vehicle for his liberating vision.

The referential and marginal features of footnotes serve different functions in criticism and literature: scholarly footnotes shore up the text by enclosing it and limiting its claims; in fiction, footnotes extend textual authority by enlarging the fictional context. Both inner- and outer-directed, these two kinds of notations display a self-conscious anxiety about the critical and creative acts they annotate. Scholarly notes mask this ambivalence by claiming extratextual authority; literary notes highlight the ambivalence by consciously dividing the text against itself. This essay examines the ways footnotes in Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegans Wake parody the notational convention and draw attention to the faulted authority of its discourse by flouting scholarly claims to objectivity and neutrality, by calling into question the relations of author and reader on textual grounds, and by using self-reflexive narrative methods to illustrate the rhetorical double bind that keeps all language at the margin of discourse.

The Tempest is an allegory of the process of interpretation in a tradition that derives from Augustine's Confessions. Allegory calls attention to signs as signs and examines their adequacy to represent truth. Shakespeare's play begins in the realm of allegory's arbitrariness. Just as the imposition of Prospero's art on nature creates a storm to disorient characters in the play, Shakespeare's drama enthralls viewers in the theater, tempting them to an error like Prospero's retreat into his study in Milan. Gradually, however, by art attuned to a providential design working in events, Prospero resolves the conflicts among the characters. The symbolic unity of life finally suggested remains nevertheless an expression more of desire and promise than of realization. To remind his audience of this truth, Shakespeare makes Prospero in the Epilogue rupture the imagined world of art and insist on the audience's relating the play's ideal meanings to their historical lives.

Since the 1960s scholars have challenged earlier assumptions concerning ritual and literature. They have seriously discredited both the “ritual theory of myth” and traditional ideas on the relation of ritual to Greek and medieval drama. Although some critics still subscribe to theories of psychoanalysis and the “Cambridge anthropological school,” current anthropology offers superior theories of ritual, particularly those of Victor Turner, with their emphasis on community. Because literature and rites have similar emotional effects we have tended to equate them, but by so doing we confuse the liminal with the “liminoid.” Modern authors influenced by Frazer often invite this comparison. Rene Girard's theories of scapegoat and civilization have provided a new, if controversial, turn to ritual criticism. Rites share their symbolic nature with art, but their peculiar satisfaction lies in the experience of community.

Blake's late engraving, erroneously known as The Laocoön, presents an unusually direct relation between the content of a literary work and the way the work is produced and consumed as an artifact. By restoring the statue's correct meaning (“Jah & his two Sons Satan & Adam”), Blake arrested its fall into materiality and application to “Natural Fact” and, in doing so, redeemed for spiritual purposes the engraving that he had begun as a commercial undertaking. In his commentary on the plate, he clarified for the first time the mutual exclusivity of art and commerce, not by making a materialist analysis, but by associating art with religion's traditional antipathy to money. He formulated a view of art as devotional practice rather than as the production of commodities, and this logic allowed the plate only the barest form of material existence.

Although we know that medieval writers were not novelists, we can still succumb to the illusion that the characters in their works occasionally exhibit a degree of psychological complexity and “depth” out of keeping with our historical expectations. Chaucer's Criseyde and Malory's Guinevere are such characters; in both, the illusion results largely from a technique of using dialogue to suggest responses, thoughts, or feelings that are otherwise hidden. To achieve such suggestiveness, Chaucer and Malory employ a device that theorists of speech acts call “implicature.” As we overhear the words of Criseyde and Guinevere, we must constantly fill in gaps, supply missing relations, and guess at some “real” meaning that the surface meaning seems to conceal. Through this process we participate in the construction of two characters whose elusiveness, opacity, and apparent inconsistency are surprisingly verisimilar.

Critics generally dismiss Lady Chatterley's Lover as a polemic, preferring to consider its content and ignore its form. Yet Lawrence meticulously shaped his strategy to reinforce his meanings. When we compare Lady Chatterley with earlier Lawrence novels and with the second of the novel's three versions, we discover the novelist using imagery in a way that is new for him. Similes and metaphors from plant, animal, mineral, and human sexual realms blend, or interpenetrate, to give depth and add texture to the novel's central action, Mellors' sexual awakening of Connie. Moreover, Lawrence strategically reshapes scenes from the second version, published as John Thomas and Lady Jane, to enrich the mythic dimensions of the novel. Lawrence's careful orchestrations of the novel's images and of the details of Mellors' character as Green Man produce, finally, a satisfying organic unity.

The Canterbury Tales is the culmination of a frame tradition that originated and developed in Arabia, not in the West. The Arabic practice of enclosing tales within a frame may be explained by principles of organization peculiar to medieval Arabic literature, art, music, and mathematics: a preference for concreteness, a stress on autonomous elements, and a reliance on external organizing devices. Most Arabic literature emphasizes the individual unit; frames remain open-ended and inconclusive and rarely determine the subject or form of any included part. Although many Western characteristics are present in medieval European frame narratives like the Disciplina Clericalis, the Decameron, and the Confessio Amantis, those works, nonetheless, reveal themselves as continuations of the Arabic tradition. Even the Canterbury Tales, with all its subtle artistry, retains qualities typical of its Arabic ancestors, notably the controlling travelpilgrimage motif, the pointedly random order of tales, and the prominent authorial personality.