ABSTRACT
In his essay ‘Text and context’, Peter Winch writes of contextual ‘surroundings’ that they ‘will of course be very various in kind and indeterminate in extent’. He goes on immediately to say ‘Critical judgments made by others will frequently be an indispensable aspect of these surroundings.’1
In the classroom, these others will be the teacher, fellow-students and critics variously encountered. In this context the class work together towards forming judgements. These days exam specifications do not say much, if anything, about critical judgement. They prefer to insist on interpretation. With Curriculum 2000, examination boards, to a greater or lesser degree, took on some of the preoccupations and assumptions of critical theory, including an emphasis on the indeterminacy of meaning of texts (a preoccupation not extended to the interpretation of their own syllabuses, of which the authors’ intentions were certainly taken to be the determiners of the meaning). They specified that students must show an awareness of the range and variety of critical opinion, and that a work is susceptible of more than one interpretation. Plurality was insisted on – we were to deal not in interpretation but interpretations. Through encountering a range of interpretations and responses to the play being studied, students were to develop their own.
