Marzenna Cyzman (Toruń)
The interpretive community, a notion established by Stanley Fish (in Interpreting the “Variorum”), was never defined by him. However, one may determine its semantics, pointing to the context in which this term is used by the American philosopher. Taking into consideration the way in which the interpretative community fulfils the function in the constructivist theory of interpretation, we come to the conclusion that this notion is consistent with the thought collective introduced by Ludwik Fleck. Both notions point to the fact that in our construction of reality, our life worlds, interpretations and activities are stimulated by beliefs, prejudices, opinions naturalized amongst the members of the particular interpretive community.
According to Fish’s conception, texts do not have meanings outside them as the meaning comes from the set of cultural assumptions shared in interpretative communities. They also evaluate interpretations, laying down the conditions of the acceptance of the interpretation which is this way neither subjective (it is created by an individual reader but his/her view cannot be totally individual as he/she is the member of the interpretive community) nor objective (the criteria of acceptance are changeable and different in different interpretive communities, moreover all of their cultural assumptions are not essential as the result of the interpretation).
Here several questions might be raised, however I would put the emphasis only on one of them. In short, I name it the question of the new. If we are always engaged in the interpretative communities from which our strategies of interpretation are taken, how is it possible for new interpretations to happen? When does a new interpretation have a chance to be expressed and stabilised in the interpretative community? What are the requirements for the interpretation to be accepted? We cannot escape our interpretative community, playing unconsciously its epistemological game, however the interpretations are not permanently stable, given once and for all. Focussing in on some examples of the circulation of the interpretations of literary texts, I would like to reflect on the problem of change in interpretive communities.
