Here we must remember, however, that there is no such thing as ‘literal meaning’ in its usual sense of ‘what a text really says.’ We often assume that, however much we differ on interpretations, a statement or text has an obvious and objective ‘literal’ aspect that preserves an unchanging core of meaning and cannot be escaped. We assume that we can isolate this stable, stand-alone meaning using the dictionary definition of its words and by removing it from any context. What we might term the ‘dictionary meaning’ of a text may indeed exist, but it is neither objective nor universal. As
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