Intention and Interpretation

I “WHAT DOES THE LITERARY INTERPRETER do? He tells us what a literary work means.” Thus says Monroe Beardsley, who has written as thoughtfully and influentially on the subject as any philosopher in the past fifty years, and this is as good a place to start as any. Though there may well be ways of embodying interpretations that do not involve saying what something means (for example, reading a poem out loud), I shall follow Beardsley’s lead and concentrate on what interpreters say, on interpretive remarks. Consider some putative examples: