Abstract
“The Hermeneutic Spiral” introduces the notion that interpretive flexibility and originality, while desirable and arguably inevitable, can cross a line beyond which some will put too much of themselves into their interpretations. Years ago, for instance, I had a friend who was utterly convinced that Superman, the 1978 Richard Donner film starring Christopher Reeve, was a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Should the meditations of such critical “outliers” be discarded, or can they be rescued by showing that in certain contexts they unearth interesting new insights? In other words, how do we decide what is “good” criticism and what is excessive? Or is it all just a series of positions on an ever-changing interpretive trajectory that moves outward from the work into the various contexts around it?
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Belton, R.J. (2017). The Hermeneutic Spiral. In: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55188-3_2
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