I am developing a new approach to analyzing early Christian literature

The Interactivist Approach takes into consideration human experiences and cognition as they are involved in the processes of authoring and reading texts

Interactivist Criticism is an applied methodology for the critical analysis of texts, artworks, and other material artifacts.  The analytical techniques of Interactivist Criticism are based on the theoretical principles of Social Psychology and 4Es approaches in Cognitive Studies, which are grounded in the claim that knowledge is constructed rather than reproduced.

Definitions

the transmission of knowledge

is a complex constructive process

Interactivist Principles

Interactivist Criticism provides a framework to analyze artifacts as constructed knowledge dependent upon an individual’s personal experiences, cultural entrenchment, and social activities and commitments.  Because the meaning of the artifact resides with the hermeneut’s engagement with the construction of knowledge produced by the author, the meaning cannot be reduced to a singular objective account.  Interactivist critics recognize that there are as many meanings of the artifact as there are hermeneuts. 

The author is the individual who produces the text, artwork, or other material object

The artifact is the product which represents the constructed and offloaded knowledge of the author

The hermeneut is the interpreter

The interpretation is the constructed knowledge of the hermeneut

Knowledge construction involves

  • the social relationships, interactions, and commitments of individuals

  • the cultural entrenchment of individuals

  • the interaction of individuals with knowledge anchors (i.e., media, texts, artworks, etc.)

  • the personal experiences of individuals

  • the perceptions of individuals

  • ongoing cognitive processes that depend on recursive or pre-existing knowledge structures (cognitive schema, scripts, domains, frames, etc.) as well as active imagination

Objectives

Interactivist critics seek to understand

  • artifacts as the constructed knowledge of authors

  • the processes of the migration of artifacts into multiple contexts by a variety of hermeneuts 

  • the interpretation of artifacts as the constructed knowledge of hermeneuts  

Interactivist critics are involved in

a range of possible analytical activities

Knowledge is constructed at the interface

of other constructions of knowledge

Interactivist critics approach any single artifact or interpretation as its own construction of knowledge that interfaces with other constructions of knowledge.  They ask why the knowledge constructed in an artifact or interpretation takes the shape it does.  Rather than engaging an artifact as a narrative that relates positivist historical information recoverable by interpreters, narratives are treated as constructions of authors who create histories and storyworlds to benefit themselves and their social commitments.

Tasks

The broad tasks of the Interactivist critics include

  • explaining the construction of knowledge produced by an author as the substrate for multivalent interpretations

  • analyzing how authors and hermeneuts construct knowledge into systems or imaginaries to meaningfully understand their world and their experiences

  • analyzing how authors and hermeneuts construct knowledge to impact discourses, agendas, movements, institutions, subcultures, and so on

  • analyzing how authors and hermeneuts construct knowledge in ways that facilitate the authentication and validation of their own worldviews

  • evaluating how the constructions of knowledge of authors and hermeneuts are entangled in social and cultural memory, dominant ideologies and intellectual histories, and metanarratives and hegemonies

  • analyzing how the constructed knowledge of authors and hermeneuts is exercised to marginalize and oppress, or protest and resist, or challenge and critique

  • assessing the actual impact of the interpretations of the artifact on people, culture, society, and/or the environment

  • investigating the historiographies of particular artifacts

  • explaining how certain artifacts have occasioned oppressive interpretations

  • explaining how certain artifacts have occasioned the “same” interpretation

  • reflecting upon how the critics’ own social, cultural, and personal locations and any recursive or pre-existing knowledge is shaping their analyses