Blackwell Reference Online

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Literature is an inseparable part of culture and it cannot be understood outside the total context of the entire culture of a given epoch… Mikhail Bakhtin, “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff (my emphasis) Interpretation takes as its basic subject our perceptual, cognitive and affective processes, but it does so in a roundabout way-by attributing their “output” to the text “out there.” To understand a film interpretively is to subsume it to our conceptual schemes, and thus to master them more fully, if only tacitly. David Bordwell, Making Meaning In Making Meaning , David Bordwell proposes the project of “historical poetics” as an alternative to an interpretation-dominated criticism of the cinema, which, he feels, has been ill-founded precisely in that interpretive activity can be characterized by the highly suspect ascription of implicit and symptomatic meanings to a text. While most scholars would not contest, but would rather welcome, BordwelPs call for a historical contextualization of the study of cinema, there would be several who would not respond as positively to his characterization of interpretive activity per se, despite the excesses of interpretation that he has outlined. Bad examples of any activity do not deny its inherent validity. However, BordwelPs objections to interpretation do not function at the level of inadequate or misplaced application ... log in or subscribe to read full text