De Interpretatione: New Creative and Existential Dimensions of Hermeneutics in Post-Modernism

Abstract

For literary theories, modern times have meant the decline of understanding (of hermeneutics) and the triumph of description (of intransigent formalism). For mainly polemical ends — i.e., turning their back on previous historical positivism — structural-formalisms of all kinds proclaimed the literariness of literature and landed it on the firm ground offered by the structure of the work, as a given datum. Early twentieth-century immanentisms discredited only value-judgement, not by directly eliminating it but rather by practically absorbing it in description, which resulted in axiology and formal logic’s merging their objects into each other. More vehement still, post-war formalism brutally disqualified hermeneutics itself and took interest in the How to the detriment of the What.