How to do thoughts with words: on understanding literature.

In the last 10 or 15 years, however, a rival paradigm of literary criticism has emerged in the form of empirical studies of literature. Scholars working in this new paradigm recommend quite a different conception of text, meaning, and understanding. This change in interest is by no means arbitrary, because it directly results from the way the research domain of literary criticism is model- led as well as from the philosophical orientation of this empirical approach. In what follows we shall first cast a short glance at the special features of empirical studies of literature (abbreviated as ESL) before we give a condensed report on how ESL might come to terms with the problem of understanding.