Writing, Method and Hermeneutics: Towards an Existential Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper is about the nature of writing practice as an existential practice. My purpose is to explore dominant ways of speaking about writing practice and explore an alternative way in which writing can be seen as existential accomplishment. In the article, I mainly focus on some central themes on the writing practice: (a) nature of writing practice (b) issue of criteria, and (c) evaluation practice. For each of these themes, I compare dominant ways of speaking about writing as self-discovery or procedural-technical practice with a way of speaking drawn from a hermeneutic approach. At the end of the article, I explore a possibility for defining a general, but flexible list of existential criteria which may refer to a list of moral virtues which aims to provide an outline, and by means of this outline giving some help to writers' critical consciousness.