Abstract
In this essay, I attempt to show that both Heidegger and his follower Gadamer were trying, through their hermeneutics of the literary text, to disclose and transcend the enclosed situation of modernist literary theory and criticism. In doing so, they were initially and originally motivated by phenomenological motives. The first part of this essay attempts to show that the crisis of modernism, which here serves as an introduction for explicating and justifying the Heideggerian/Gadamerian approach, lies in its formalist tendency and its conception of method. In its second and third parts successively, I attempt to show how both Heidegger and Gadamer transcend phenomenologically these twofold roots of the crisis.
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Notes
For a detailed explanation of Merleau-Ponty’s point here, see his essay on “Indirect Language and the Voice of Silence,” in his Signs, trans. with an introd. by Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 49ff.
William V. Spanos, “Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutical Circle: Toward a Post-modern Theory of Interpretation as Disclosure,” in Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature: Toward a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics, ed. William V. Spanos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 116.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Origin of Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert Sullivan (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1985), p. 180.
Ibid., loc. cit.
Gerald Bruns, “Disappeared: Heidegger and the Emancipation of Language,” in Languages of the Unsayable, the Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 117.
Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971), p. 112.
For a detailed discussion of this point, see: Bruns, op. cit., passim.
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975), p. 75.
Ibid., loc. cit.
Ibid., p. 74.
Ibid., p. 73.
Quoted in Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock (Chicago: Regnery, 1949), p. 293. For a Heideggerian reading of the phrase see pp. 299–300.
From a lecture delivered by Ricoeur in English at Wheaton College, 1969. Quoted in Robert Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature (West Lafayette: Indiana, Purdue University Press, 1987), p. 81.
Ibid., p. 69.
William J. Richardson, Heidegger through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 528.
Heidegger, On the Way to Language,op. cit., p. 120.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Semantics and Hermeneutics,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 82.
Ibid., p. 87.
Ibid., loc. cit.
Ibid., p. 88.
Gadamer, “Man and Language,” in ibid., p. 63.
Gadamer, “Semantics and Hermeneutics,” in ibid., p. 90.
H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 144–145.
Ibid., p. 145.
H.-G. Gadamer, “On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 106ff.).
H.-G. Gadamer, “Composition and Interpretation,” in ibid., p. 69. It is worth noting here that the concept of “objectively interpreted experience” in this context does not mean “objective interpretation,” rather it means an experience which has an object other than our subjective representation of the aesthetic form.
Ibid., loc. cit.
Ibid., loc. cit.
Mario J. Valdes, Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 33.
Gadamer,Truth and Method,op. cit., p. 322.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1976), p. 50.
Gadamer,Truth and Method, op. cit., p. xxiv.
H.G. Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 51.
Ibid., loc. cit.
Gerald Bruns,Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth and Poetry in Later Writings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), op. cit., p. 6.
Gadamer,Truth and Method, op. cit., pp. 322ff; see also Kathleen Wright, “Literature and Philosophy at the Crossroads,” in Festivals of Interpretation: Essays on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Work, ed. Kathleen Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 237–238.
Robert J. Dostal, “Philosophical Discourse and the Ethics of Hermeneutics,” in Wright (ed.), Festivals of Interpretation…, op. cit., p. 65.
Ibid., loc. cit.
Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,”op. cit., p. 65.
Wright,op. cit., p. 237.
For a detailed analysis of this point, see Dieter Misgeld, “Poetry, Dialogue and Negotiation: Liberal Culture and Conservative Politics in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Thought,” in Wright (ed.), op. cit., pp. 165–169.
Quoted in Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” op. cit., p. 293.
Ibid., pp. 301–302.
Heidegger,On the Way to Language, op. cit., p. 124.
Ibid., p. 125.
Gerald Bruns, “Disappeared: Heidegger and the Emancipation of Language,”op. cit., pp. 127–128.
Gadamer, “On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth,”op. cit., p. 106.
Ibid.,loc. cit.
Heidegger,Being and Time, op. cit., p. 56.
Valdes,op. cit., pp. 60f.
Ibid., p. 38.
Jean Grondin, “Hermeneutics and Relativism,” in Wright (ed.),Festivals of Interpretation, op. cit., pp. 50–51.
Paul Ricoeur,Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essay on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 143.
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Tawfīk, S. (1998). The Phenomenological Motives of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s Hermeneutics of the Literary Text. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative Virtualities. Analecta Husserliana, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4900-6_14
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