文档介绍：The Reading of Theoretical Texts
Since the structuralist debates of the 1970s the field of textual analysis has largely
remained the preserve of literary theorists. Social scientists, while accepting that
observation is theory laden, have tended to take the meaning of texts as a given
and to explain differences of interpretation either in terms of ignorance or bias.
In this important contribution to methodological debate, Peter Ekegren uses
developments within literary criticism, philosophy and critical theory to reclaim
this study for the social sciences and to illuminate the ways in which different
readings of a single text are created and defended.
Peter Ekegren is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences,
University of Örebro, Sweden. He was previously Senior Lecturer in the Department
of Sociology, Uppsala University.
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Epigraph xi
Preface xiii
1 General introduction 1
Language and textuality 1
Critiques 3
Excursus: ‘discourse’ 10
Notes 12
2 The social sciences and criticism 14
Innocent readings 14
The understandings of the theories of value in Adam Smith and
David Ricardo 22
Guilty understanding 28
Notes 34
3 Language and criticism 37
Scientific texts/literary texts: scientific language/literary language 37
Languages 54
Saussure and his oppositions 59
Language, sign, difference and flow of meaning 62
Notes 70
4 The teleological mode of reading 80
Author and intention 81
The teleological mode of reading 89
Michael Dummett’s ‘exegesis’ 93
Notes 104
viii Contents
5 Interpretation and the harmonious whole 108
Interpretation as repetition 108
The unity of the text 112
The fallacy of the holy whole 116
Indeterminacy 120
Notes 124
6 Holes in wholes in wholes 127
Terminologies 128
Schools of thought 131
Language practices 134
The text 142
Meaning production 152
Paradigmatic leaps 166
Concluding remarks 172
Notes 173
Bibliog