The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies

This study, an investigation of how human beings make cultural works meaningful, compares the different meanings that readers from the West Indies, Britain, and the United States constructed from a single source, the fiction of Barbadian novelist George Lamming. The socially shared presuppositions they brought to their reading caused West Indian reviewers to interpret Lamming's novels as involving questions of personal and national identity, British reviewers to concentrate on the novels' language and literary qualities, and American reviewers to emphasize race. Each of Lamming's novels exercises a different degree of "cultural power," and this capacity to engender multiple meanings while retaining coherence shows that cultural meanings emerge from the interaction between cultural works of varying power and human recipients of varying expectations and concerns. In turn, this interaction suggests a theory of metaphor that enables research in the sociology of culture to utilize both cultural and sociological data without reducing one to the other.