Peter Szondi is widely regarded as being among the most distinguished post-war literary critics. This first English edition of one of his most lucid and interesting series of lectures opens up his work in hermeneutics for English-speaking readers. The question of what is involved in understanding a text occupied Biblical and legal scholars long before it became a concern of literary critics. Peter Szondi here traces the development of hermeneutics through examination of the work of eighteenth-century German scholars. Ordinarily treated only as prefigurations of Schleiermacher, the work of Enlightenment theorists Johann Martin Chladenius, George Friedrich Meier, and Friedrich Ast yields valuable insight into the 'material theory' of interpretation, on which a practical interpretive methodology might be built.

The Shijing ("Canon of Odes") is China's oldest poetry collection, traditionally considered to have been edited by Confucius himself. Despite their enormous importance for Confucianism and Chinese civilization, the 305 odes have for millennia also puzzled readers. Why did the Sage include in the Canon apparently lewd poems about women promising men to "hitch up" their skirts and "wade the river," and men "tossing and turning in bed" yearning for young women? What did the innumerable representations of plants, beasts, and birds, and of various climactic and astronomical phenomena, signify beyond their immediate function as natural descriptions? One such puzzled reader was Mao Heng, a learned Confucian employed at a minor court in the mid-second century BCE. The object of this study is the Commentary that Mao composed on the Odes, and in particular the hermeneutic tool—the xing—that he invented to explain the figurality and tropes at play in them. Mao's "xingish" interpretation of the Odes is both genuinely hermeneutic, in that it explains the rhetorical organization of these poems, and thoroughly ideological, since it allows Mao to transform them into Confucian dogma. The book also argues that the xing, content, function, and cultural importance, is comparable to the Aristotelian concept of metaphor (metaphora), and that the xing, the Odes, and the practice of shi (Chinese "poetry") demand an intercultural, "comparative" reading for a more nuanced understanding.

This book analyses the most significant aspects of the evolutionary process which occurred in literary hermeneutics: the shift from interpretation perceived as a methodology of reading to the ontological function of exegesis. Through the discussion of the theories of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Eric Donald Hirsch, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, it focuses on the metamorphosis of the concepts of meaning, interpretation and validity, and demonstrates how the correlative changes in the essence and functions of these three elements transformed the art of understanding from being a methodological discipline to an ontological instrument for a re-description of the interpreter’s self. The book highlights the development of those aspects of hermeneutic thought which are of particular significance in the contemporary debate over validity and criteria of interpretation. The vision of hermeneutics proposed here contradicts the supposedly anachronistic character of the art of understanding, and, through a permanent departure from essentialist views and categories, enables it to enter into a discussion with such literary orientations as neo-pragmatism and reader-response theory.

Scientific Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Literature - Africa, University of Nigeria, language: English, abstract: Theories of language, linguistic and non linguistic communication are diverse. In the Humanities there are so many interpretative tools. These tools are means to an end and not the end in themselves. Just as we have equations in the natural sciences so do we have theoretical frameworks, literary criticisms and approaches to literature and the communication arts in the Humanities. These interpretative tools are keys to opening and analyzing works in the Humanities and other disciplines. Most of these theories are borrowed from other disciplines other than the ones exploiting them. In the literary sciences, rooms are given for inter-textual interpretations as well as for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches. Hence one could analyze a given fiction, drama or poem using one or more approaches as the case may be. At the primary and secondary school level, essays are simply written and novels are simply read and interpreted by simple minds. But at the tertiary educational level, one would expect the reader, the critic or the recipient to be thorough, analytical and scientific in his appraisal of the text before him. In receptions-theory the analytical mind is not left empty handed in this art of researching on or beyond the text .For one to access these tools effectively one must be equipped with literary terms. Interpretative tools are legion. Some are text-centered and linguistic and others are extra-textual and non linguistic. Hermeneutics and the sister theoretical frameworks like the positivism, formalism, explication de texte, New Criticism, Structuralism, post-structuralism, Semiotics, de-construction etc are text-centered interpretative tools while the society based theories like Marxist-socialism, psycho-analytic theory, feminism, receptions-theory, racial theory, cultural and intercultural studies, Literature and the media, literature and history, literature and biography etc fall under the beyond textual interpretative approaches. Our interest in this exercise is on the raw textual analytic approach. Many students usually prefer the easier approaches which are mostly society based and abhor the dry and puritanist approaches. This paper is aimed at introducing the audience to the rigors of scientific approaches to the study of texts, images and languages.

Contents papers presented at the International Symposium on Contemporary Literary Hermeneutics and Interpretation of Classical Texts. Cf. Editor's introd.

Scientific Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Literature - Africa, University of Nigeria, language: English, abstract: Theories of language, linguistic and non linguistic communication are diverse. In the Humanities there are so many interpretative tools. These tools are means to an end and not the end in themselves. Just as we have equations in the natural sciences so do we have theoretical frameworks, literary criticisms and approaches to literature and the communication arts in the Humanities. These interpretative tools are keys to opening and analyzing works in the Humanities and other disciplines. Most of these theories are borrowed from other disciplines other than the ones exploiting them. In the literary sciences, rooms are given for inter-textual interpretations as well as for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches. Hence one could analyze a given fiction, drama or poem using one or more approaches as the case may be. At the primary and secondary school level, essays are simply written and novels are simply read and interpreted by simple minds. But at the tertiary educational level, one would expect the reader, the critic or the recipient to be thorough, analytical and scientific in his appraisal of the text before him. In receptions-theory the analytical mind is not left empty handed in this art of researching on or beyond the text .For one to access these tools effectively one must be equipped with literary terms. Interpretative tools are legion. Some are text-centered and linguistic and others are extra-textual and non linguistic. Hermeneutics and the sister theoretical frameworks like the positivism, formalism, explication de texte, New Criticism, Structuralism, post-structuralism, Semiotics, de-construction etc are text-centered interpretative tools while the society based theories like Marxist-socialism, psycho-analytic theory, feminism, receptions-theory, racial theory, cultural and intercultural studies, Literature and the media, l

Hermeneutics, defined as the theory of understanding and interpretation, has become a major concern for literary criticism in recent years. This study attempts to illustrate the natural connection of hermeneutics to literature through the interpretations of selected 19th century literary texts. Although hermeneutics has been presented traditionally in the context of the German philosophical tradition from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, these works show a sophisticated awareness of the categories of language and understanding which parallels and even supercedes concurrent trends in philosophical hermeneutics.

The articles in this collection focus attention on the concept of literature and on the relationship between this concept and the concepts of a literary work and a literary text. Adopting an analytic approach, the articles attempt to clarify how these concepts govern our thinking about the phenomenon of literature in various ways, exploring the issues which arise when these concepts are employed as theoretical instruments for describing and analyzing the phenomenon of literature.