noted by text-centered approaches, the meaning of artistic elements is
not under the original author’s control. However, an author-centered
approach is common sense or intuitive, since all authors, perhaps even
those writing literature in the pure-art category, intend to communicate
something to their readers, even if it is only to provide an occasion for an
affective experience.
Text-centered approaches take advantage of both the absence of the
author and the artistic nature of the Bible’s more literary texts. We no
longer have access to the biblical authors, and while it is possible to make
inferences about an author’s intentions from features observable in a text,
it remains true that all we have certain access to is the canonical form of
the text itself. With some literary forms that are closer to the pure-art end
of the spectrum, even if we did have access to an author, that author might
not be able to interpret a text better than anyone else. 27 In addition, the
closer an author has moved to the pure-art end of the spectrum, the less
the author wants to control interpretation.
Reader-centered approaches rightly emphasize the actions that readers
take when reading. Texts are meant to be read, and the nature of the read-
ing and meaning-construction processes must be taken into account when
defi ning what “meaning” in texts is.
Reality-centered approaches recognize that literary texts often have con-
nections to empirical reality and that authors make truth-claims through
their texts. Narrative and poetry, even though they are artistic forms, can
often make these claims in even more powerful ways than can proposi-
tional language.
Literature-centered approaches , Keesey notes, do better at accounting
for genre-specifi c conventions in a text than do text- or reality-centered
approaches. 28 To interpret a text, it is necessary to place it within a genre
and approach it using the parameters set by the conventions of that genre.
Language-centered approaches recognize the great extent to which the
author’s work and the interpreter’s perception is only possible because
author and reader have mastered, or have been mastered by, both the lan-
guage within which she or he creates or reads, and the connections of the
particular text with other texts. 29
Culture-centered approaches , according to Keesey, are especially good at
“dismantling foundationalist and essentialist arguments, for deconstruct-
ing ideologies, for delegitimizing power, and generally demonstrating that
nearly everything called universal, timeless, and natural is really local, his-
torically contingent, and socially constructed.” 30
284 M. TENNESON ET AL.