2006年英语专八真题听力原文

　　听力原文

　　Part 1, Listening Comprehension

　　SECTION A MINI-LECTURE

　　Good morning! In today's lecture we shall discuss what meaning is in literary, works. Whenwe read novels, poems, etc. , we invariably ask ourselves a question—that is, what does thewriter mean here? In other words, we are interested in finding out the meaning. But meaning isa difficult issue in literature. How do we know what a work of literature is supposed to mean orwhat its real meaning is? I'd like to discuss three ways to explain what meaning is.

　　No. 1, meaning is what is intended by the author. ( Q1)

　　No. 2, meaning is created by and contained in the text itself.

　　And No. 3 , meaning is created by the reader.

　　Now, let's take a look at the first approach—that is, meaning is what is intended by theauthor. Does a work of literature mean what the author intended to mean? And if so, how canwe tell? If all the evidence we have is the text itself and nothing else, we can only guess whatideas the author had according to our understanding of literature and world. In order to have abetter idea of what one par¬ticular author means in one of his works; I suggest that you dothe following:

　　First, go to the library and read other works by the same author. ( Q2)

　　Second get to know something about what sort of meanings seem to be common inliterary works in that particular tradition and .at that time. In other words, we need to findout what the literary trends were in those days. ( Q3)

　　And last, get to know what were the cultural values and symbols of the time. I guess youcan understand the author's meaning much more clearly after you do the related backgroundresearch.

　　Now, let's move on to the second approach to meaning—that is, meaning is created byand con¬tained in the text itself. Does the meaning exist in the text? Some scholars argue thatthe formal prop¬erties of the text like grammar, diction, uses of image and so on and soforth, contain and produce the meaning, ( Q4) so that any educated or competent reader willinevitably come to more or less the same interpretation as any other. As. far as I amconcerned, the meaning is not only to be found in the literary traditions and grammaticalconventions of meaning but also in the cultural codes which have been handed down fromgeneration to generation. ( Q5) So when we and other readers, inclu¬ding the author as well,are said to come up with similar interpretations. That kind of agreement could be created bycommon traditions and conventions of usage, practice and interpretation. In other words, wehave some kind of shared bases for the same interpretation, but that does not mean thatreaders agree on the meaning all the time. In different time periods, with different culturalperspec¬tives, including class, belief and world view, readers, I mean competent readers, canarrive at dif¬ferent interpretations of tdxts: ( Q6) So meaning in the text is determined byhow readers see it. It is not contained in the text in a fixed way.

　　Now, the third approach to meaning—that is, meaning is created by the reader. ( Q7) Doesthe meaning then exist in the reader's response? In a sense, this is inescapable. Meaningexists only in so far as it means to someone , and literary works are written in order to evokesets of responses in the reader. This leads us to consider three essential issues.

　　The first is—meaning is social—( Q8) that is, language and conventions work only a sharedmeaning and our way of viewing the world can exist only a shared or sharable. Similarly, whenwe read a text, we are participating in social or cultural meaning, so a response to a piece ofliterary work is not merely an individual thing but is part of culture and history.

　　Second, meaning is contextual. If you change the context, you often change the meaning.

　　And last, meaning requires reader competency. ( Q9) Texts constructed as literature havetheir own ways of expressions or sometimes we say styles. And the more we know of them, themore we can understand the text. Consequently, there is in regard to the question ofmeaning; the matter of reader competency as it is called the experience and knowledge ofcomprehending literary texts. Your professors might insist that you practice and improvecompetency in reading and they might also insist that you interpret meaning in the context ofthe whole work. But you may have to learn other compe¬tencies too. For instance, in readingMulk Raj Anand's The Untouchables' you might have to learn what the social structure of Indiawas like at that time, what traditions of writing were in practice in India in the early 1930s, whatpolitical, cultural and personal influences Mulk Raj Anand came un¬der when constructing theimaginative world of the short novel. ( Q10) Ok , you may see that this i¬dea that meaningrequires competency in reading in fact brings us back to the historically situatedun¬derstandings of an author and his works as we mentioned earlier in this lecture, to differentconven¬tions and ways of reading and writing and to the point that meaning requires anegotiation between cultural meanings across time, culture, class, etc. As readers, you have infact acquired a good deal of competency already but you should acquire more. The essentialpoint of this lecture is that mean¬ing in literature is a phenomenon that is not easily located,that meaning is historical, social and de¬rived from the traditions of reading and thinking andunderstanding of the world that you are educated about. Thank you for your attention!

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