Meaning and Value

Since the emergence of post-structural criticism, most literary scholars have generally agreed that meaning is not universal, that an act of interpretation takes place in a specific context. Language does not come with inherent meaning and cannot be immediately apprehended. It is the contextual act of interpreting, including the assumptions and intentions of the interpretive act, that determines the meaning of a text. Thus much consideration has involved the “politics of interpretation,” an area of cultural studies that refers to the purposes and presuppositions which generate meaning. Rejecting past New Criticism methods, literary scholars today tend not to discuss literature in terms of universal truths or eternal verities.

Yet literary scholars are generally less willing to accept the contingencies of value. In a landmark essay, Barbara Herrnstein Smith demonstrated that value, like meaning, depends on situations of use, social relations, and other cultural structures of significance. Cultures throughout the world have self-developed systems of value and meaning that have no place whatsoever in the categories assumed by New Criticism to be universal. For these people “other verbal artifacts (not necessarily works of literature or even printed texts) have performed—and do perform—the various functions that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare perform for us. The literary canon is not a product of essential, natural transcendental values, but of a historically specific cultural tradition.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, “Contingencies of Value.” Critical Inquiry 10 (September 1983), 1-35.