Antinormative Interpretation

This book is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of linguistics (semantics/pragmatics), experimental literature and art, with excursions into the environmental humanities. The book proposes a new style of artistic and literary practice which takes the space of interpretation as its artistic sandbox. The proposal is developed for the literary case and concretized using the tools of formal linguistics, specifically of formal models of linguistic meaning. In the process, the author calls into question the nature of the practice of linguistics as a science, and some foundational assumptions of that field; she also shows how to do a new kind of literary and conceptual work in the domain of interpretation and meaning assignment. The whole project has deep connections with games and rules, partly via the notion of constraint in experimental literary work and partly via the notion of interpretative rule in compositional formal semantics, and also (in its last parts) with the more-than-human as represented in language and the environmental humanities. This book will be of interest to readers based in fields including Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy and Environmental Humanities. 

Elin McCready is Professor in the Department of English at Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan. Her academic work is mostly on linguistics and philosophy of language and she has published several books and many articles on these topics. Her current research focuses on social meaning, literary meaning and interpretation, and political speech.