This chapter examines the central role of interpretation in forging the connection between literature and life developed in the previous chapters. Recent approaches to interpretation tend to focus too narrowly on the language of literary works, developing theories that shed light on how we assign a determinate meaning to some ambiguous or otherwise semantically curious feature of a literary work. Though a fully developed theory of interpretation certainly must address this, meaning in literary-critical contexts is frequently much more complex than this. When we speak of meaning in literary-critical contexts, we are typically concerned not primarily or especially with the signification of the language of a literary work but rather with significance of the fictional worlds the text brings to view. The search for literary meaning is in large part the struggle to render explicit the import, the consequence, of the worlds that literary works bring to view. It is argued that interpretation of this variety brings to light something quite extraordinary. The process of rendering explicit literary meaning reveals a certain way of investing fiction with life — namely, by placing the imagined lives we find in literary works within larger contexts of human activity. It is by way of the interpretative act of situating fictions in a critical context that specifies how they are ‘about’ or ‘mean’ something of general, and very much real, consequence that we can see how the bridge between the fictional and the real is built.
Keywords: literature, life, humanism, interpretation, literary-critical context