You will recall that in Reading Argumentative Texts I took the position that there is no one authoritative reading of any argumentative text, no one definitively correct reading of such a text. Instead, there are better and worse readings of a text. How do you know that your reading of a text tends fall on the worse end of the spectrum, or is so far off the mark that it could be called “bad”? In Chapter 3, I discussed four ways in which your reading of an argumentative text can be “bad,” four errors any one of which place your reading outside of the zone of a reasonable reading.
There is also a fifth way in which your reading of a text can fall outside the zone of reasonableness. That is to read far more into the text than the sources of meaning of the text allow. Or, equivalently, to read something far different into the text than the sources of meaning of the text allow. (Recall that the sources of meaning for an argumentative text are its words, structure, context, and the reasonable inferences from those.) This phenomenon is known as the overinterpretation of a text. You can think of overinterpretation like a flood. You house is inundated with water when you just wanted enough rain to water the garden.
A reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, for example, that interpreted it as an argument for monarchy as the best form of government would be outside of the zone of a reasonable reading of that text. Lincoln nowhere mentions “monarchy” in the 272 words of that speech. Moreover, his political career was entirely supportive of our constitutional democracy, so there is no contextual support for such a reading of his speech. These are just two of many reasons why such a reading imports far too much meaning into the text, meaning which the text cannot support.
Or consider any of the essays we discussed in Reading Argumentative Texts or in the companion Workbook. Should someone read one of these essays and declare that “properly understood” it definitively solves the question whether President Kennedy was killed by one gunman or more than one gunman, you would say that person is crazy or delusional. There is no secret or hidden meaning that can be extracted from any of those texts that addresses or solves this debate.
Many novels and other works of literature are subject to overintepretation. The novelist and scholar Umberto Eco discusses this with respect to his own novels in a collection of essays, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge U. Press 1998). His insights into both interpretation and overinterpretation are instructive.
Reading Argumentative Texts 