Introduction

This chapter turns more directly to the form in which questions about meaning are raised. I show how meaning issues are not reducible to a general interrogative: ‘what does this mean?’ In media disputes and controversies, ‘meaning questions’ reflect a number of different, more specific categories. Each raises its own questions about what a meaning is and what might count as evidence in support of or against it.

Limits of interpretation

Imagine a reader of George Orwell's Animal Farm who believes the book is an entertaining story about personified animals (as many books for children are) but who resists any suggestion that it might be about anything else. Should that reader be encouraged to see that ‘the meaning’ of the book, drawing on what is sometimes called ‘the method of Aesop’, lies in how it uses a fictional uprising of pigs and other animals at Manor Farm as a vehicle for political allegory? If so, its meaning is about corruption of revolutionary impulses and the rise of Stalinism, as well as about human hypocrisy in general, rather than about either farms or animals. You might try to persuade such a reader towards those arguably richer meanings by focusing on episodes or themes to which the narrative gives particular prominence. Or you might highlight parallels between what happens in the book and what happened in twentieth-century European political history. Or you might trace the author's stated concerns in this and his other books.