Abstract

In David Lodge's novel Changing Places, the protagonist Morris Zapp recalls his plan for a series of commentaries examining Jane Austen's novels under every possible rubric, from the historical to the structuralist, the mythical to the Marxist--all in order so to monopolize interpretation as to exhaust it altogether. I take it that Michael Krausz would find Zapp's ambition both unpalatable and impracticable, although he does not actually rule it out of court. Krausz's topic is interpretive ideals, and his target is the "singularist" who holds that any object of interpretation is in principle open to only one "right" interpretation. To this view, Krausz opposes his own "multiplism," which claims that "the range of ideally admissible interpretations in some practices should be multiple".