1.

The notion of text interpretation:

2) Approaches to text interpretation:

a) objectivist, subjectivist and balanced (rational) paradigms.

Scholarly approaches to text interpretation can be roughly divided by the ctiterion

of preference given to one of the textual senses, i.e. universal, the author's or the
reader's sense. Accordingly, we can distinguish the following trends,
or paradigms of literary text interpretation from ancient times to the 70-80s of the
20th C., when they achieved a definite form:
1) objectivist paradigm: treats the sense attributed to the text by its author as
objective and explicable, thus being the major purpose of research;
2) subjectivist paradigm: literary text interpretation is not determined by the text
itself but relies completely on its readers' perspectives;
3) balanced, or rational paradigm: proceeds from the assumption that the sense
of literary text can be elicited from the dialogue between the text and the reader.
The German philisopher Hans-Georg Gadamer formulated 2 basic assumptions
of interpretation: 1) interpretation is, principally, open and infinite; 2) text
comprehension is inseparable from the interpreter's self-understanding.

b) hermeneutic, psychological, pragmatic, allegoric-symbolical and

philological perspectives.
The hermeneutic prospective, (focuses on the reader's perception)followed by
Umberto Eco, among other scholars, advocates the active role of the interpreter
and an "open-ended reading", i.e. potentially unlimited elucidation of a text. The
radical hermeneutic approach falls under the subjectivist trend of interpretation,
finding the reader's sense of a text to be only valid one and discarding the author's
intention. Eco abides by the rational paradigm by trying to reconcile the objectivist
and subjectivist trends with his "third possibility" - looking for an "intention of the
text".
The psychological (psychoanalytical) perspective (focuses on the author's
perception) is based upon the Freudian and Jungian treatment of the literary text
as a form of sublimation of the writer's subconscious, primarily sexual, desires and
archetypal images. Using this approach, an interpreter looks for hidden
connections between the writer's style and his/her phsychological traits. This
perspective complies with the main postulates of the objectivist paradigm.
Psychological approaches attempt to apply modern psychological theories to
authors and their works. Critics use such approaches to explore the motivations of
characters and the symbolic meanings of events, writer's own motivations and
reader's personal responses to a text. Because of the predominance of Freudian
psychology in the twenties century, psychological criticism usually relies upon the
theories of Sigmund Freud. Freud's ideas are complex and multiple not all of them
relate to literature. But literary critics (4) find three of them very attractive: the
dominance of the unconscious mind over the conscious, the expression of the
unconscious mind through symbols, in dreams and the primacy of sexuality as a
motivating force in human behavior. These three ideas are related.

The pragmatic perspective of the literary text interpretation is aimed at the

exloration of implied relationships between the author and the adressee; in other
terms, the author's expectations about the reader and his/her literary response. This
perspective belongs to the rational paradigm.
The allegoric-symbolic perspective treats the literary text as an ambigouos
(twofold) construction that conceals hidden ("dark", obscure) senses under the
cover of its images.
The philological perspective intergrates linguostylistic and literary stylistic
approaches to the analysis of fiction. The goal of this interpretation is to decode
both the author's and reader's senses of a fictional text through the study of the text
genesis and its impact upon the reader. This perspective is a crossroads where
different interpretative paradigms converge.

3) The main categories of a literary text:

• The main categories of a literary text:

• integration;
• conceptuality;
• implicitness;
• discreteness;
• modality;
(im)personality.
1.Integration represents unification of all parts of literary text for the sake of
achieving its wholeness. The two facets of integration are cohesion and coherence.
Cohension - is an outer (or formal) organization of text based on lexical,
grammatical and other links between words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, etc.
Coherence - a feature of the internal (or semantic) organization of text based on
logical links between successive ideas.
2) Conceptuality is the fundamental text category, which is defined as the
organization of a text around a certain idea.
At the heart of any text lays an organizing idea or concept, which ensures
thesemantic unity of the text. To reveal the main idea (the concept), – the theme
and the message of a text should be profoundly analyzed.
Theme is the general content of a text, presented in a condensed way, and
distancing from the plot details of a text eases the process of defining the theme.
By the message of a text, all the implicative conclusions are meant; these
inferences are to be drawn from the text individually. And usually the message of
any literary work is revealed through different facades at all stages of its reading
and interpretation
3)In any literary text its main idea is implicit. This phenomenon has
linguistic nature, as there is always sub-text, which conveys additional sense.
And the richer a reader’s thesaurus is, the higher his/her ability to identify
anddecode text implications. Scholars distinguish many implicates, among them:
superficial implicates (“time savers” or expressive means based on the
reduction of the syntactical pattern, for example: ellipsis, aposiopesis,
asyndeton, etc. [12, p.64]), trite implicates (“dead” metaphors, for example),
local implicates (authors’ style carriers), deep implicates (are important for
decoding the message of a whole text), deep implicates (important for a whole text
interpretation images) and dark implicates (reminiscence - the act of recalling or
narrating past experiences; allusion - a passing reference; oblique or obscure
mention, deciphering requires specific knowledge)
4)In order to interpret adequately any text, the category of discreteness
should be also profoundly analyzed. Discreteness of a literary text refers to its
formation from certain parts. To define text discreetness, the reader should isolate
its compositional structure and partitioning. Along with the classical
plot elements, a sub-plot should be also profoundly analyzed as it may be of
equal significance as to the main plot [9, p. 91]. The classical plot includes the
following elements: exposition, the beginning of the plot, plot complications, the
resolution, and the conclusion. In some texts an interpreter may observe the
classical plot parts rearrangement. This feature of literary texts usually also
comprises an independent development of sup-plots and an unpredictable
presentational sequency of events (illogical backbone of the plot). This technique
may be analyzed in the spectrum of modality of a text.
5)The other textual category which should be taken into account is
modality. It is a common knowledge that all the literary texts possess
modality, in other words, there are no stylistically neutral literary texts.
Modality is understood as: a logical correspondence of textual content to the
objective reality (objective modality); and the author’s attitude towards the
narrated events, which is revealed through a selection of language resources,
images, stylistic devices and other textual elements (subjective modality).
Being a brainchild of the author’s comprehension of reality, a literary text
(nowadays we observe this phenomenon even in the economically or
politically tinged speeches or texts) reflects the picture of the world strained
through the author’s personality. The choice of the theme of the literary work,
modal and evaluative words, the choice of objects for narration, - all these add to
manifestation of modality. The author’s interpretation of the reality depends also
on the ways time and space are reproduced in a text. The way the events in a
literary work are described may correspond to their real sequence and duration on
the one hand, or a researcher may observe multi-dimensional literary space and
time. In this case we speak about flashbacks and flash forwards. The precise
investigation of stylistic devices and expressive means adds to the revealing the
subjective modality of a text