Page 71 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
parallel in the work of the major exponents of Reception Theory.
This refers to the critical school which emerged in 1964 in associa-
tion with the University of Konstanz. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in
particular, asserts that the literary work never pops into the world
as a finished and neatly packaged parcel of meaning, since
meaning depends on the historical situation of the interpreter. For
Gadamer, understanding a text or event involves a process of
ongoing mediation between the present and the past. The inter-
preter is always historically situated and her/his present context
therefore determines how s/he understands texts and events. At
the same time, the interpreter's present context also affects her/his
attitudes to the past. Readings of the past depend on particular
assessments of history in the present. Simultaneously, our grasp of
our present circumstances is influenced by what we make of the
past. The temporal dimension is also emphasized by H. R. Jauss,
who argues that a text is received against a collective horizon of
expectations: an accepted set of cultural values that define what a
text may be predicted to communicate within a particular commu-
nity at a particular time. The more radically a text departs from
the horizon against which it appears, the more innovative it is.
The impact of the ideas we formulate and the ways in which we
express them is inseparable from the historical contexts in which
they occur.
In the domain of science, this point has been sustained by T. S.
Kuhn whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) divides
the history of science into two categories: periods characterized by
uniform development within an accepted paradigm and periods of
drastic change in which the dominant set of concepts is displaced
and a new paradigm is introduced. The replacement of one
paradigm by another is not dictated by logical and predictable
criteria. No obvious evolutionary trajectory can be traced in
paradigm shifts. A new paradigm is adopted when a community
of people working in a certain area (e.g. science) finds it necessary
to formulate new ways of dealing with the data under investiga-
tion. Relatedly, a fact in science depends on the frame of reference
which the observer brings to bear on the object.
Theories of reading have also been influenced by Gestalt
psychology, according to which the human mind does not perceive
things as discrete elements but rather as configurations, or orga-
nized patterns. In interpreting a text, the reader looks for such

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