Social Science and Literary Criticism: What is at stake?

As the variety of methods used by biblical scholars mul­ tiplies, new sub-disciplines are being born that all too often leave specialists isolated from each other. While at some points the various methods com plem ent each other, at others they rem ain contradictory or mutually exclusive. Two of the newer such methods, literary criti­ cism and social-science criticism , have until now re ­ mained in isolation. In recent months, however, a dialo­ gue has begun to emerge that seeks to explore the com­ mon ground or lack thereof between these two methods. This article is a beginning reflection by a social-science critic on some of the issues involved. Biblical scholarship is perhaps at a m ajor crossroads in its m odem de­ velopment as regards the nature o f biblical narratives. It has been diffi­ cult to decide whether biblical narratives are about real orfictive events.

Biblical scholarship is perhaps at a m ajor crossroads in its m odem de velopm ent as regards the nature o f biblical narratives.It has been diffi cult to decide whether biblical narratives are about real orfictive events.(Funk 1988:296) A t issue in the debate is the question o f which should dom inate in tex tual interpretation, the information internal (intrinsic) to the text or con textual information that is external (extrinsic) to the text, like the author' s intent, his biography or the historical and cultural climate o f his times.which it is believed that valid interpretations can be arrived at; the other polar position is that o f radical indeterminacy (eg, J Derrida), in which it is believed that we cannot validly interpret a text because texts have many meanings, not merely one right one.(P etersen 1985:6) The three quotations above locate the ground from which most of the em erging dis cussion betw een social science and literary critics arises.'Strictly speaking, of cour se, not all the argum ents are special ones betw een literary and social-science critics.
Som e are betw een literary critics and individuals doing historical analysis of any kind, while others are am ong literary critics them selves.Yet in one way or another alm ost all of them are argum ents in which social-science critics have a stake.
O ne en ters this conversation, of course, with a certain am ount of trepidation.
T he und erton es of ideological suspicion are everyw here in the literature as the ad vocates of interpretive determ inacy and objectivity on one side battle the claimants of indeterm inacy and free play on the other.T erm s like 'au th o ritarian ' and 'pu rita nical' fly in one direction while labels like 'escapist' and 'nihilist' fly in the other.All of that is best left aside.
Several im portant areas of controversy are worthy of note.First, there is the na ture of narrative texts.A re the gospel texts to be understood as fiction?A re they historical?O r is the realism in them to be construed primarily as literary verisim ili tude?Equally fundam ental is the question about w here and how m eaning em erges.lated to its content?Equally im portant, but rarely asked, is a question about the re lationship betw een the formal properties of the text and the world external to it.
Finally, we may ask, in what sense do authors m atter?A re narrative texts com m unications from som eone, to som eone, about som ething?T h at is, do the texts tell us som ething?O r are they 'stories' in the technical sense -that is, do they show us som ething?We might even ask if they invite us to participate in som ething?T hat is, should we understand them as language events -perhaps ones which the text ini tiates but the reader com pletes?
Many other questions could be asked, of course, but perhaps these are the cen tral ones at issue.Obviously not all of them can be taken on in a limited space.F u r therm ore, in addressing any of the controversies a whole spectrum o f answers is pos sible and any answer will depend on the assumptions one m akes going in.If the determ inacy of language is radically questioned, for exam ple, there can be little sub stance to an argum ent about w hether the texts are fiction or history.Likewise, if we assume that m eaning is perm anently fixed in the text, interpretation is largely a m at ter of historical inquiry and there is little point to herm eneutics.
N one o f these are m atters to be taken for granted, of course, because they are the very substance of the disagreem ents am ong us.M oreover, it is im portant in this regard to recognise that not all literary critics treat these m atters in the sam e fas hion.Some assum e the com plete autonom y o f the text (new criticism), but not all.
N or do all im agine limitless polyvalency.N ot all question the determ inacy of lan guage.M oreover, many literary critics are open to historical questions, including the kind asked by those interested in the heuristic use o f the social sciences.
B efore jum p in g into a discussion o f th e issues them selves, how ever, a word about presuppositions is in order.T here are several underlying the work o f virtually all social science critics th at are im p o rtan t to understand.First, the fundam ental working assum ption of social science criticism is that language always encodes a so cial system.It is always concrete social com m unication and never a closed system of objective signs.Language brings to expression a system of shared perceptions and values and thereby gives each of us a sense of 'w orld' which we share with those so cialised in a sim ilar way.In a very critical sense, language reifies world and thereby constructs world.T hus as P eter B erger (B erger & Luckm ann 1966;B erger 1967) and T hom as Luckmann (B erger & Luckmann 1966) have rem inded us, 'life-world' is always a codification of a social reality.M oreover, as Beidelm an (1970:30) points out, language is m ore than simply gram m ar, syntax and vocabulary.It is ra th e r 'the sum total of ways in which the m em bers of a society symbolise or categorise their ex perience so that they may give it order and form '. Language thus includes 'not only w ords but gestures, facial expressions, clothing and even household furnishings -in ISSN 0259 9422 » HTS 4 9 /1 A 2 (1993) Sodal Sdence and Literary Crilidsm short, total symbolic behavior'.U nderstood in this sense, language requires the kind of social sem iotic analysis that underlies virtually all social science criticism.
Second, social-science critics take seriously the fact th at thought, writing, re a d ing and interpretin g always take place in a p articu lar social location and th at these social locations play a critical role in the way language functions.W ith an thropolo gists of knowledge we take for granted the basic insight th at there is a fundam ental relationship betw een thought and the social conditions u n d er which it occurs.This m eans that texts, like thoughts, always exist in relationship with w hat P eter Berger calls a 'plausibility stru c tu re ', a socially constructed province of m eaning in which certain things m ake sense.
T given perception should be understood by those who share the range o f comm on ex perience.A social location, th erefore, is always a heuristic construct, not a causal m echanism (Ro.hrbaugh 1987:113-115).
All of this is a way of saying, of course, that our sense of 'reality' is itself a social construct, and it is therefore to be understood as 'fictive' in the sam e sense th at n ar rative texts are fictive.'R eality' is not an objective item that can be set over against the fictive world of the text as if it w ere o f a different order.The contrast betw een fictive world and real world is a false one.But for social-science critics it is most im portant to recognise that sense of reality is socially constructed.It may vary in som e m easure for individuals in the sam e society, but it rem ains profoundly social in cha racter.A nd this m eans th at, like language, thoughts and fexts, so also the acts of w riting, read in g and in te rp re tin g can never be co n stru ed as m erely textual acts.
They are social acts as well.They all occur in and are lim ited by a particular social location.They all particip ate in the fictive ch aracter of all hum an symbolic in te r action.
Such then are the assum ptions most social science critics make going in.To us they are essential, the sine qua non of textual in terpretation.With these presuppo sitions in front of us, th erefo re, we must turn directly to a discussion o f w hat is at stake for us as social science critics when we read a text.W e may begin by saying th a t social-science critics a re co m m itted to a h istorical read in g o f biblical texts.
Since we have our own angle from which to view that m atter, however, it is im por tant to think about it at several distinct levels.Obviously we are not talking about a 224 HTS 4 9 /1 A 2 (1993) historicising naiveté which assum es a one-to-one relationship betw een stories and events.
Initially se to the social-sciences, the judgem ent that a text is or is not historical is all too of ten m ade on eth n o ce n tric or anachronistic grounds.We rightly insist, th erefore, that anyone trying to assert that a text claims no historical referent, or that a particu lar referen t is or is not historical, should do so in explicitly socio-historical term s.
Claims based on the latest ideological version of w estern idealism are singularly u n persuasive.
It is also possible, of course, to raise historical questions about literatu re other than allegedly historical narratives.W ith fictional narrative -parables for example -the ground shifts slightly and forces us to address historical concerns at new levels.
O ne of these has to do with w hat literary critics call 'v erisim ilitude' -referred to above (also called 'recuperation', 'naturalisation', 'm otivation' -see Funk 1988:293; T olbert 1989:30, especially note 19), that is, with the 'realism ' that even parables use in o rd er to establish plausibility for a story.The social-science critic's concern for history can have much to say about how verisim ilitude is created.Plausible stories, like plausible language, w hether intentionally historical or intentionally fictional, are always em bedded in a social system and always encode it in very substantial ways.
W ithout that, the verisim ilitude the fiction w riter requires would not be possible at M oreover, they do so in a particular social location o f th eir own.This m eans that the question of m eaning cannot be divorced from the question about w ho is doing the reading.Texts w ithout contexts are no less com plete than texts w ithout readers.
A nd that is because the real re ad er brings to the act o f reading a world of h is/h e r own, from which a great deal is drawn into the conversation as text and reader inter act.
It is obvious that not everything necessary to a conversation can be w ritten down victions rath er lightly is the pre-condition o f co m petent reading, then 'having them interrog ated and subverted by the text is not really very significant' after all.The irony here, of course, is that even an open-ended parable is a text with a definable authorial intent.It 'intends' to explode the life-world and assum ptions of the reader.
But even beyond this is the fact that if texts are absolute in the sense that they can be divorced from all questions of authorial intent, they are also separable from the social context of origin and hence are treated not only ahistorically but also asocially.Such an approach lends itself to the excessive individualism o f W estern societies, but depends upon a virtual denial o f the anthropology of knowledge and the social location of thought.Looming large here, of course, is the m atter of m ultiple m ean ings in texts or, as som e literary critics would prefer to put it, the m atter of determ inacy and indeterm inacy.In denying the value of authorial intent, som e critics seek to make room for the kind of polyvalence that has been elevated to essence in p ara ble studies, though most argue that polyvalence exists in virtually all texts w hether p arables or not.T his is an im portant issue since it is clear th at if a text can mean anything, it really m eans nothing at all: It is merely a vehicle for what its latest rea d er wishes to say.N or can a completely polyvalent text be construed as com m unica tion in any strict sense o f the term .T h ere is ra th e r w idespread ag reem ent, th e re fore, that limits on polyvalence exist even if not all agree on w here o r how to place them .The one item on which all social science critics would insist, however, is that a particular social system represents a control on multivalency th at we cannot over  (1975).
3. F o r a discussion of the p arab le of the G re a t B anquet in a social-science pers pective, see R ohrbaugh (1991).
5. This latter point is nicely m ade in the work o f T erry E agleton (1983:108) who argues that treating texts ap a rt from the social and historical settings that p ro duced them is, after all, just the latest chapter in the history o f classical W estern idealism.
6. T o those interested in history, especially social history, and convinced of its cru cial place in textual interpretation, the 'new historicism ' is a w elcom e reaction (see Lentricchia 1980).(1983:67-74).

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P etersen 1985:6) Currently, however, the debate am ong literary critics hinges on the re lated question o f ju st how determinitive even intrinsic textual informa-tion is o f our understanding and interpretation o f texts.One polar position in the debate is that o f radical determinacy (e g, E D H irsdi), in Is m eaning fixed by the intention of the author?Is it located in the texts them sel ves?Is som ething external to the text to which the text points?O r does m eaning em erge from the interaction of text and context?We also may ask if m eaning em erges in the interaction of text and reader(s)?If it does, w hat is the relativ e w eight of re a d e r and text in this reg ard ?A nd what about m ultiple readers?If each reader interacts with the text differently, do texts al ways have m ultiple m eanings?If so, w here are the limits and w hat are the criteria of validity in in terp re tatio n ?T h ere is also the question about the nature o f lang uage?Is language sufficiently determ inative th at m eaning can be specified?V ali dated?D oes the possibility of multiple meanings vitiate the historical character of a text?A related concern has to do with the form al properties of texts.A re they aes thetic objects?A re the formal m arkers, either deep structures or surface gram m ar, a key to m eaning?A re they sufficient?How are the literary properties of a text re an assertion o f historical interest might be construed to get us into the ongoing deb ate abou t the relation o f the gospel texts to the real history of Jesus of N azareth.T h at is obviously a historical question at its most basic level.Yet while that debate is an im portant one which, in many ways, is at a crossroads in New T es tam ent scholarship right now, and much as it might be ap p ro p riate to com m ent in o rd er to discuss thoroughly the n ature o f fictive, fictional and historical narratives, space perm its only a few simple comm ents.(SeeFunk 1988:295-298  for a discussion of the current anguish over the question of historicity.)In assessing historical claims about the New T estam ent, social science criticism can m ake a substantial new contribution.By showing the ways in which the texts en code the social system, we can help to evaluate the plausibility o f historical claims m ade on o th er grounds.We can tem per the scepticism th at literary scholars som e tim es dem onstrate (because the texts are technically fictive in n ature) by helping to determ ine if it is literary verisim ilitude o r actual historical interest that is being as serted regarding a text.We also can help to distinguish am ong historical claims.If we can show the plausibility o f a story in the social setting o f village life, for exam ple, it is a far b e tte r can d id ate for historical d ata a b o u t Jesus than a story whose only plausible setting is the pre-industrial city (see O akm an 1986).W ithout recour ISSN 0259 9422 -H TS 4 9 /1 A 2(1993)  Social Sdcncc and Literary CriticLsm all.O ur concern then is that, even when dealing with fictional texts, the socially and historically dated character of the encoding system comes into play.A good exam ple can be found in the recen t work o f the Jesus Sem inar of the W estar Institute (Sonom a, C alifornia).In reading through the rep o rt o f the Jesus S em inar on the parables of Jesus one gets the im pression th at of the many criteria for authenticity the au th o rs claim to use, one p red o m in ates(Funk, Scott & Butts   1988).It is the b e lie f th a t Jesu s' a u th en tic p a rab les pose 'o u trag eo u s' o r 'highly exaggerated' situations for the re ad er to ponder.T he authors readily acknowledge that the m etaphors in parables are taken from everyday life, yet they claim that 'Je sus chooses m etaphors that surprise (the leaven as as figure of the holy), or that ex aggerate (everyone refuses to com e to a dinner), or that satirise (the m ustard seed pokes fun at the mighty cedar th at represents Israel).The read er must always look fo r the surprising twist in the story, the unusual figure, th e paradoxical p a tte rn '(Funk et al 1988:16).TTie problem here, o f course, is that one must know the typical before one can designate som ething atypical or surprising.T h e com m ent noted above ab o u t all th e guests refusing to com e when invited to a d in n er provides an example.This k e n a rio struck the Jesus Sem inar participants as outrageous, exagge rated behaviour.They tre a te d it as atypical(Funk et al 1988:43).But how could they know this?In fact, exactly the opposite might have been be the case.Double invitations th at anticipated such difficulties w ere com m onplace in antiquity.They are discussed in both the papyri and the Mishnah, and indeed examples of all the in vited dinner guests not showing up exist elsew here in the literature.^T he situation is not atypical, exaggerated or outrageous at all.The p arab le may o r may not be authentic, but the criterion has been mistakenly applied because the social situation of antiquity has not been taken seriously.^The Jesus Sem inar R eport imagines m o dern dinner parties and the attitudes of m odern hosts and on this basis m akes a his torical judgement.'*In his recent book on parables, B randon Scott (1989:67-68) re cognises this problem , acknowledging that we must know first what is typical before we can pronounce som ething atypical, but he then claims that only literary concerns are at issue.T his brings us to yet an o th e r level at which social-science critics are com m itted to a historical reading o f the texts.If we are right in m aking the claim that language encodes a social system, and if the social system that New T estam ent language encodes is th a t of the M ed iterran ean world in the agrarian period, then the key to deciphering the language o f the New T estam ent cannot be derived from social systems o th e r th an the one th at produced it.H ere the in te rp re te r m akes a consciously historical choice.H istorical or social location is not simply the 'back ground' of a text.It is encoded, em bedded, reflected and responded to in a text.It is not a point of reference for a text, it is the text and the text is it.A nd since this 226 H TS 4 9 /1 A 2 (1993) ystem of social conventions is itself a historical reality, a reality of a n o th er time, a n o th e r place and an o th er culture, it must be uncovered and recovered in ord er to understand in w hat way the text is an em bodim ent of it.Social-science criticism is thus historical in a very fu ndam ental sense: it assum es th at a social system of the past, from a culture th at precedes the industrial revolution, is the necessary key to understanding the language in the text.A nd that is tru e w hether the text claims a historical referen t o r not.The verisim ilitude and its contravention on which p ara bles depend is itself dependent on a historically locatable social system that the text encodes.R elated to this concern over the use o f verisim ilitude in the p arab le texts, of course, is the assertion of some literary critics that biblical texts, and particularly the parables, are to be construed as rh etorical-aesthetic objects and th erefo re studied primarily for their formal properties as art.For some critics this allows discussion of the parab les ap art from any consideration of their historical or social location b e cause m eaning is construed to em erge from the characteristics o f the text as text, not from the encoding of the social system in the text.We can leave aside the controversy over the degree to which formal characteris tics in a text carry the freight claim ed for them , though som e stru ctu ralist claims about univer.sality of pattern have rightly been criticised by both historians and an thropologists.For social science critics the main problem in some treatm ents o f for mal properties has once again to do with our concern for anachronism and ethnocentrism .We rightly ask w hether the forms the critics claim to see are constructs conditioned by the social location of the critics themselves.5An example o f the eth nocentric danger in judgem ents about form can be seen in Mary A nn T o lb ert's re cent work on M ark.W earing her literary hat, T olbert claims that one of the key dif ferences betw een ancient and m odern fiction is that in m odern fiction 'ch aracter' is highly developed w hereas in ancient literature it is portrayed in a 'flat, stereo-typi cal, passive and static m anner' (T olbert 1989:76).She notes especially that the 'il lustrative characters of ancient literature are static, m onolithic figures who do not grow or develop p.sychologically' (T o lb ert 1989:77).To h er credit she argues that we must take this difference seriously, but like many literary analysts she treats this formal feature as if it were a simple result of the rudim entary quality o f ancient fic tion.She seem s unaware that flat, stereotypical characterisations are an encoding of the ancient M editerranean social system which understood all people in that way in real life.Likewise, she seem s unaw are that the psychological, introspective charac ter of W estern novels encodes the social system in which we live and in which we ty pically view hum an nature in those terms.We are introspective.A ncient M editer ran ean people w ere not, for reasons having to do with honour-sham e values and ISSN 0259 9422 ■ = UTS 4 9 /1 A 2 (1993) Soda] Sdence and Láerary Crilidsm dyadic views of personality (M alina 1979:126-138; M alina 1989:127-141).The diffe rences are thus much m ore than literary.They are social and historical as well.We must always ask, therefore, the degree to which aesthetic and form alistic considera tions are in the anachronistic and ethnocentric eye of the beholder.O ne addition al and fundam ental controversy in which we as social science cri tics have a stake has to do with the so called relation of text and context.As N or m an P etersen (1985:6) points out, these are 'the two principle sources o f inform a tion bearing on the interpretation o f texts' though a substantial argum ent exists over which should dom inate interpretation, inform ation internal to the text or contextual inform ation th at com es from outside.H ere we begin to confront one o f the m ost im portant issues in o ur discussion: How and w here does textual m eaning em erge?M any, o f course, acknow ledge th at text and context in te ra c t in th e pro d u ctio n of m eaning.W hatever weight they may assign to context, they assum e that it provides the backdrop for reading and interpretation.U nfortunately, however, that does not quite say enough for eith er the historian or the social science critic.Â t the outset we acknow ledged that the so called 're a l' world is itself a fictive construct.It does not differ in kind from the fictive w orld th at narrative creates.T h at contrast is a fal.se one that drives a non-existent wedge betw een text and con text.A nd, most em phatically, we would argue that real world, context, call it what you will, cannot be simply 'background' for reading a text.T hat likewise implies the two are discreet realities.But the text encodes, is em bedded in, reflects, responds to and is inextricably dep en den t on the social life-world it em bodies.D ivorce it from th at world and it is no longer the sam e text.The point is a critical one.Rem oved from its social location in the M editerranean world of the first century, a parable is no longer the sam e parable.A fter all, the plausibility the p arab les a ttem p t to in voke is a plausibility in their world, not ours.An additional problem , now widely re cognised by literary critics them selves, is that construing text and context as sep ara ble entities not only fails to take social location seriously, it fails to take the reader in to acco u n t as w ell.R e a d e rs, at least real rea d ers, do stan d o u tsid e th e text.
because a text simply cannot say everything th at needs to be known ab o u t a topic u n d er discussion.T o do so would be tedious in the extrem e and clutter the text to he point of unreadability.InesitaDly, then, th ere is much th at m ust be left to the im agination of the re ad er because an author depends on a read er to fill in the gaps from the life-world they share in com m on.Successful com m unication can be c a r ried on in no other way(M alina 1991:3-24).T hinking about m odern w estern read ers reading ancient M ed iterran ean texts requires us to clarify the situation one step fu rth er.E ach tim e a text is read by a new reader, the fields of reference tend to shift and multiply because each new re a d er fills in the text in a unique way.A m ong literary theo rists this p henom enon is usually called 'recontextualisation', a term referring to the m ultiple ways different readers may 'com plete' a text as a result of reading it from within their different so cial locations.(T exts may also be 'd eco n te x tu alised ' w hen read ahistorically for th eir aesth etic o r form al characteristics.)Such reco n tex tu alisatio n is of course a fam iliar phenom enon to students of the Synoptic Gospels.It is nicely illustrated in the work o f redaction critics, for example, who have shown us how shifts in the set tings of the parables of Jesus in the various gospels have altered their em phasis a n d / or m eaning (e g the parable of the Lost Sheep in Mt 18:12-13; Lk 15:4-6; T hom as 98:22-27).In w hatever m easure each of these new recontextualisations of the Jesusstory 'co m plete' the text unlike an original h earer of Jesus might have done, an in terpretative step of significant proportions has been taken.T he sam e is true for recontextualisations into the world of the m odern reader.Moving the text from the M editerranean culture continent in which it was w ritten to the new setting in the W estern, industrialised society w here it is now read, is a very far-reaching recontextualisation indeed.No New T estam ent w riter ever imagined a tw entieth century A m erican as a real, im plied or ideal reader.T he social locations of the original audience(s) and the m odern au d ien c e(s) d iffer in such significant m easure that n eith e r audience could be expected to co m p lete the u nw ritten e le m ents of the text in the sam e way.O f critical im portance for social science critics therefore is the recognition that this particular recontextualisation, this m odernisa tion of the text, is itself profoundly social in character.R eaders socialised in the in dustrial world are unlikely to com plete the text o f the New T estam en t in ways the ancient authors could have imagined.We simply do not intuitively know the social system the language encodes.O ne final issue we might discuss is the m atter of authorial intent, especially in so far as it bears on the sense in which texts are com m unication from one p>erson to another.In recent literary studies, of course, it is com m on to pronounce 'intentional fallacy' upon any attem pt to imagine what the original author had in mind.Literary analysts are sharply critical of attem p ts to 'get inside the head of the au th o r' in the hope of estim ating what h e/sh e might have intended.Since the gospel authors can ISSN 02LS9 9422 -UTS4 9 /1 A 2 (1993)Social Sdencc and Literary Cri(id.smnot be questioned, it is assum ed we cannot probe th eir intentions in any substantial way.M oreover, since different read ers com plete tfie text differently, it is assumed that it cannot have a single, th a t is authorial, m eaning anyway.Y et one need not hold the extrem e position of E D H irsch th at authorial intent is both available and determ inative of all m eaning in order to ask if the texts are com m unication in some real sense?'^If they are, they are w hat som eone (an author) m eant to say to som e one else (a read er) about som ething in particular.W e may not be able to discover fully what that is, but that does not m ean we cannot discover anything about it at all.No one would claim, for example, that the gospel w riters w ere talking about nuclear disarm am ent.But there is an o th er thing to be said here.As W alter Benn M ichaels(1983:344)  has shown, 'language can only be understood as a set of intentional acts,' and thus 'to use language at all [as speaker, hearer, w riter or reader] is to acknow ledge the centrality of in ten tio n '.H e argues th at 'w hat a text m eans and w hat the author intends it to m ean are the same thing,' hence interpretation is largely a m at ter o f trying to figure out what this intention might be(M ichaels 1983:344).O r as Stanley Fish (1983:283) puts it; 'It is impossible not to construe it [intention]' in the act of interpreting.T his is not, of course, an argum ent th at we can get inside the head of an author.The point Fish (1983:283) seeks to make is rather that intentions are a form of 'conventional' behaviour and are to be 'conventionally' read.So that instead of referring the m atter of intention back to an original author, an individual, a social science critic will insist that it be referred back to an original system o f so cial conventions that has left its mark in the encoding conventions o f the text.In this connection, some literary critics, particularly in parable research, are un easy about claims of authorial intent because they argue that p arables have no in tended message, no subject m atter in any direct sense.Being inherently polyvalent, they suggest that parables are not inform ation about anything but rath er are lang uage events m eant to explode the world of the h e a re r/re a d e r and open up possibili ties for a new 'w orld' to come into being.But as Terry Eagleton (1983:79) points out, such a theory is both anachronistic and ethnocentric.It is 'based on a liberal hum anist ideology: a belief that in reading we should be flexible and open-m inded, p rep ared to put o u r beliefs into question and allow them to be transform ed.'The ideal reader, the com petent reader, is the liberal humanist.An ideologically com m itted reader is a.ssumed to be an inadequa te reader since h e/sh e is 'less likely to be open to the transform ative power o f litera ry works' (E agleton 1983:79).M oreover, as Eagleton (1983:79) points out, the irony here is th at the claim ed ch aracter of the text (op en -en d ed ) aim s at producing the very kind of re a d e r (open-m inded) th at it already presupposes.In fact, if the text really m eans to explode our pre-existing convictions, and thus if holding o n e's con 230 HTS 49/1 <t 2 (1993) look.A limited range o f experience m eans a limited range of plausibility structures and therefore a lim ited range of meanings.The new and novel are always possible, but even they participate in the dom inant social matrix.The issue here, of course, is validity in interpretation and in her new book on Mark, Mary A nn T olbert (1989:10-13) lists several criteria for 'adjudicating' am ong a list o f m ultiple interpretations.T hese c riteria a re not to be used, she argues, to discrim inate b etw een 'right and w rong' interpretations (which are in theory ruled out), but rath er betw een in terp re tations that are m ore or less 'persuasive' to 'm odern' readers.We may note in pas sing th at the problem s with T o lb e rt's list are legion, hence som e w ould no doubt w ant to form ulate it differently.But the real issue here is not the adequacy of T ol b e rt's list.It is ra th e r that any list of criteria for validity in in terp re tatio n m ust be prefaced with a critical assum ption.U nless we buy into the fallacy o f the a u to n o mous text, authorial intent (w hether or not we can say fully what it is) and authorial location in the M editerran ean world o f the first century m ean th at plausible in ter pretations, if they are truly interpretations and not platform s, and if they are truly in terp retatio n s of this text ra th e r than som e other, are lim ited to those th at address the authorial audience, not the m odern one.E thnocentric and anachronistic read iS S N 0 2 5 9 9 A 2 1 ^H T S 4 9 /IA 2 (l9 9 3 ) Social Sdcncc and Literary Crilidsm ings may be interesting, but they fail to take seriously a comm unicative dim ension in the text, they disrespect the very creativity of the a u th o r which th e literary critic claims to be constitutive of the text and they allow the needs o f the m odern read er ('interesting', 'persuasive to the m odern read er') to overshadow the text to such d e gree that it ceases to be little m ore than a set of directions for self-expression.We thus em phatically assert the need to take au th o rial in ten t -in the sense of social convention -seriously if an in terp re ta tio n is claim ed to be an in terp re ta tio n of a particular text rather than som e o th er one.Obviously these questions and reflections could go on.But in looking over the ram blings above, it seem s that a num ber of m atters stand out for those who are in te rested in the social sciences and New T estam ent interpretation.It really does m at ter to us that authors, texts, audiences, readers and meanings are understood to en code and incarnate historically and culturally locatable social systems.It does m at ter th at the range of m eanings in a text is lim ited by the social system the text e n codes and th at w renching it away from th at system irretrievably alters the text.It does m a tte r to us th a t texts are com m unication and th at they have au th o rs with som ething to .say.A nd finally, it m atters to us that writing, reading, hearing and in terpreting are all, in a fundam ental and inviolable .sense, the most social of acts.E ndnotes 1. T he first significant discussions took place at the 1991 Society of Biblical L ite rature M eeting in Kansas City.Further efforts are planned for 1992 and 1993.2.C f Lam R 4:2; see also Es 5:8; 6:14; Philo, O p if 78.F or th e papyri see Kim 7. F or an excellent discussion o f the w eakness of H irsch's position, see E agleton