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On Interpretive Conflict

By: John Frow

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Paperback | 13 August 2019 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
216 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.2 x 1.39 x 0.14

Paperback

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“Interpretation” is a term that encompasses both the most esoteric and the most fundamental activities of our lives, from analyzing medical images to the million ways we perceive other people’s actions. Today, we also leave interpretation to the likes of web cookies, social media algorithms, and automated markets. But as John Frow shows in this thoughtfully argued book, there is much yet to do in clarifying how we understand the social organization of interpretation.

On Interpretive Conflict delves into four case studies where sharply different sets of values come into play—gun control, anti-Semitism, the religious force of images, and climate change. In each case, Frow lays out the way these controversies unfold within interpretive regimes that establish what counts as an interpretable object and the protocols of evidence and proof that should govern it. Whether applied to a Shakespeare play or a Supreme Court case, interpretation, he argues, is at once rule-governed and inherently conflictual. Ambitious and provocative, On Interpretive Conflict will attract readers from across the humanities and beyond.

Industry Reviews

"Timely and relevant for a wide audience, this volume provides interesting expository descriptions of four major interpretive conflict contexts. . . . Frow employs a textual Marxist-relativist-inspired structural approach, illuminating institutional 'regimes of interpretation', i.e., regimes that establish protocols, create interpretive conflicts issuing from temporal, political, and contextual changes, all animating the landscape of functionally interpreted meanings. . . . Recommended."

-- "Choice"
". . . On Interpretive Conflict is admirably direct. Except for specialists in the topic, the question of "intention" in interpretation has become worryingly inexplicit in contemporary literary criticism . . . Interpretive Conflict is a welcome corrective to this tendency. --Len Gutkin "Genre"

"Frow has long been one of the Most Valuable Theorists in the enterprise known as cultural studies. In a wonderfully eclectic analysis that ranges from the U.S. Constitution to The Merchant of Venice, from climate change to the history of iconoclasm to the work of Aboriginal artist Dorothy Napangardi, Frow shows us how the conflict of interpretations weaves the social fabric, setting the terms for how we apprehend one another--and the nonhuman world as well."

--Michael Berube, Pennsylvania State University
"Through a brilliant and wide-ranging prolegomenon followed by original case studies drawn from law, literature, art, and climate science, Frow powerfully unfolds the role that interpretive conflict plays in the knowledge worlds that shape our present realities. According to Frow, the regimes of reading advanced by particular interpretations direct discussion but do not determine it, making room for invention and creativity in the construction of new arguments and readings. On Interpretive Conflict will initiate its own interpretive conflicts, demonstrating decisively why thoughtful argument matters today."--Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine

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