Institution and Interpretation (Expanded Edition)

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by Samuel Weber

Stanford University Press

Due/Published November 2001, 360 pages, paper

ISBN 0804731195

You may remember the original edition from many years ago as a volume in Minnesota's Theory and History of Literature Series. Now, as before, Institution and Interpretation investigates the forces that shape and limit interpretive practices. Whereas the prevailing use of the term "institutions" tends to reduce their role to that of maintaining the status quo, Weber suggests that institutions are never entirely free of the need to consolidate their authority through an ambivalent process of reinstituting themselves, a process in which interpretation plays a crucial role. Interpretation thus emerges not only as an activity made possible by institutions but as an essential component of their operation.

To the book's original nine essays--addressing such topics as professionalism in criticism, the relation between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics, and the contemporary situation of the humanities--this new edition adds six essays, two of them previously unpublished. Topics discussed include the future of the university and of the humanities, Kierkegaard's notion of "repetition," Josiah Royce's conception of a "community" of interpretation, and the problematic place of reading in reader-response theory.

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Closure and Exclusion
2. The Limits of Professionalism
3. The Debt of Criticism: Notes on Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in This Class?
4. Capitalizing History: The Political Unconscious
5. The Critics' Choice
6. The Blindness of the Seeing Eye: Psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics, Eststellung
7. Reading and Writing--chez Derrida
8. The Debts of Deconstruction and Other, Related Assumptions
9. Ambivalence: The Humanities and the Study of Literature
10. How to Stop Worrying
11. Suassure and the Apparition of Language: The Critical Perspective
12. Caught in the Act of Reading
13. The Vaulted Eye: Remarks on Knowledge and Professionalism
14. The Future of the University: The Cutting Edge
15. The Future of the Humanities: Experimenting
Notes
Index