Against “Cultural Misreading”

Abstract

In the last few decades, post-structuralism and de-constructivism have disclosed illusionary hypotheses on the uniformity of significance of a literary work. By doing so, they have encouraged a paradigm of pluralist interpretation in literary studies. – This definitely brought a fresh view to the matter, but at the same time the boundaries of non-critical reception of the principles of pluralist interpretation were also exposed. This article tries to show the boundaries of non-critical practice of pluralistic interpretations of Marquez’ novel One Hundred Years of Solitude as a post-modernist or meta-fictional work. Since the novel itself offers an unambiguous key for a different, “mythological” reading, such interpretations can be understood as “cultural misreadings”. Usually this can be found among those interpreters who do not know the literary culture of the target text sufficiently well. However, a situation where similarly inadequate interpretations are provided by culturally competent experts indicates that a precondition for avoiding such lapses is not so much cultural studies, but rather a heightened hermeneutic consciousness.