Hermeneutic Practice Research Articles

Intensive Care Unit Nursing: An Interpretable and Hermeneutic Practice

Intensive care unit (ICU) nursing is an interpretive practice. Hermeneutics, as an interpretive philosophy, is an ideal approach to make meaning of the ambiguities that exist in this intensive practice setting. This paper uses the underpinnings from Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to explore the idea that ICU nursing is an interpretive practice.

Intensive Care Unit Nursing: An Interpretable and Hermeneutic Practice

Intensive Care Unit Nursing: An Interpretable and Hermeneutic Practice

Die Judenbuche and the “Judens‐buch”: Hermeneutic Hindrance and Scriptural Reading in Droste‐Hülshoff's Crime Novella

The article presents Annette von Droste‐Hülshoff's Die Judenbuche as a reaction to the disjunction between textual interpretation and confessional belonging in modernity. I argue that the epicenter of this critique is the insertion of a Hebrew sentence that embodies both in its language and in its content—talion law—the word of the Bible as a legal authority. Appearing in the midst of the novella, the biblical language creates a “hermeneutical hindrance,” and signals the reliance of interpretation on religious training of scriptural reading. Die Judenbuche thus alerts to the codependence of hermeneutical practices and moral codes. The article concludes that in the novella, the adherence of the village's Jews to the language of the Bible hints that confessional difference may subtend diverging cultures of interpretation and perpetuate the distinct moral codes that they convey.

Understanding and power of discourse

The author makes a hermeneutic analysis of the concept of discourse. It is stated that each individual discourse shapes its discursive reality by its own rules, which can be understood only within the given discourse system.The paper explains and reviews the forms and mechanisms of impacts of discursive practices involving the interpreter on his understanding of the world. The author assumes that discourse in relation to a specific person is given. A human life is incorporation of discursive practices already in existence into reality through school, social communication, means of mass communication and numerous social practices to which a person has to be a part. Thus, a person always understands reality only within those interpretative schemes which are postulated in discourse.The key thesis for understanding discursive practices is an indivisible unity of language with its use in a specific communicative situation. Words and hence the objects they denote take a meaning only in the context of a certain communicative (discursive) practice. Taking words out of the context of a specific discursive practice results in misunderstanding and distortion of the meaning. The meaning is connection of language expression, pronouncement with a communication context rather than a real or ideal object which exists apart from language. It is a discursive practice as pronouncement of certain words, which is a source of their adequate understanding. Each discursive event occurs however within a defined discursive formation, it serves as a context of a specific language or hermeneutic practice. According to Foucault, each statement or concept implicitly comprises a number of connotations which during talking are likewise introduced into the context of a discursive situation. The use of a certain concept refers us to its connotations which in their turn refer us to the central texts of the given discourse. It becomes possible to understand either concept or event owing to the available connotations some of which are determined only within discourse.

A Modem Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits by Andrea Timár

134 BOOK REVIEWS Andrea Timar. A Modem Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 180. $90. Andrea Timar describes her compact and engaging study of Coleridge as a first attempt to bring into conversation the “discourses of cultivation, ad­ diction, and habit” (1). Contending “that the ultimate aim of Coleridgean education is to turn the working of free will into the automatism of habit” (2), Timar scrutinizes Coleridge’s idea of the human by focusing on three concepts that seem to reveal the complex entanglements and potential ma­ terial deternrinacy of the Coleridgean will. The result is a fairly standard, naturalist, and in outline declensionist narrative extending from the ostensi­ bly reflective and value-laden domain of education via the psychophysiological inferno of Coleridgean addiction to the “automatism of habit.” At stake in Timar’s argument is, ultimately, the inherent truth value of “Coleridge’s thinking about the human” and its declared source: the hu­ man will. Already early on, she moves to challenge Coleridge’s key claim, namely, that the will preserves its integrity “not only without but even against alien stimulants” (6). This contestation is unfolded in more detail in Part 2 (“Addiction”), which features an engaging discussion of the seeming defeat of a reflective, cultivated imagination by what Coleridge judged so apprehensively as “the mindless overconsumption of printed works” and the public’s seemingly limitless “desire for being further stimulated” (66). Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire-inspired discussion of the trau­ matic shock ofa type of “event” (Erlebnis) that refuses to be converted into meaningful “experience” (Eifahrung), Timar sees Coleridge resisting this dynamic. Her chapter on “Intoxicated Reading” explores Coleridge’s compound anxiety over his own addiction to stimulants, novel reading, and large-scale reading audiences addicted to novels and romances yet un­ able to distill any meanings from their consumptive reading habits. Timar finds that dynamic captured with special poignancy in the figure of Christabel, so utterly paralyzed by Geraldine’s “shrunken serpent eyes. . . . That all her features were resigned / To this sole image in her mind: / And passively did imitate / That look of treacherous hate.” Yet what does it mean for Coleridge’s poetry and prose to throw into re­ lief, time and again, the mind’s addictive proclivities? Does a poem like “Christabel” not institute a reflective and attentive model of reading pre­ cisely by staging, at the level of plot and description, the disastrous conse­ quences arising from its opposite: viz., reading as sheer mindless addictive gazing? Here Timar’s argument seems unclear about whether to regard Coleridge’s conception ofthe human as ultimately succumbing to the same addictive dynamic that his writings often capture with such forensic preci­ sion. Coleridgean mimesis, I would maintain, does not inadvertently repli­ cate the addictive pathologies that furnish its subject matter. Rather, SiR, 55 (Spring 2016) BOOK REVIEWS 135 through its highly sophisticated formal and figural structure, it tends to yield a considered perspective on the treacherous dynamics of cultivation, addiction, and habituation. The larger point here is that in engaging literary and philosophical writing ofany variety, we inevitably commit ourselves to fundamental assumptions as to whether the reflective and analytic opera­ tions of a given work merely conceal an underlying and supposedly ines­ capable naturalistic scheme, or whether the latter can be positively tran­ scended by the hermeneutic practice of writing and reading, respectively. To put the matter in the form of a question: does Coleridgean mimesis in the final analysis enable reflective cognition or merely replicate the addictive pathologies that furnish its dramatic proposition? By and large, Timar’s account seems to plump for the latter, naturalistic position. Thus she opens by positing the supposed capacity of stimuli “to undermine the workings of the will [and to] render individuals simi­ lar to those passive beings that are governed by ‘alien stimulants’ or . . . even to automatons or machines” (6). Yet it is not clear from her account why “stimulatability” should be considered a specifically “human character­ istic” (6; Timar’s emphasis); Coleridge for one credits both animal and hu­ man organisms with a responsiveness to stimuli, though he is also careful enough not to invest “stimulatability” with efficient, causal powers where...

Solomon au feminin: (Re)translating Proverbs 31 in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames

Solomon au feminin(Re)translating Proverbs 31 in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames Jeanette Patterson (bio) In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville defines the interpres, or translator, as one situated “between two languages” as well as one who stands “between God, whom he interprets, and men, to whom he reveals the divine mysteries.”1 Rita Copeland points to this quote as emblematic of the conceptual inseparability of translation and glossing in the Middle Ages, where these related hermeneutic practices shaped the reception of texts and the conversation surrounding them. The interpretive “standing between” was in some sense the necessary yet problematic condition for the “carrying across” of translation. By repackaging ancient Latin texts for a contemporary French audience, medieval translators not only recoded them “word for word” or “sense for sense”; their translations brought old texts into dialogue with contemporary debates, and as such, filled an important social function.2 In framing that dialogue, translators did not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the texts they translated, nor were they bound by modern standards of objectivity or of “fidelity” to an “authentic” original or its presumed authorial intent. Indeed, translators who failed to properly situate controversial material within a culturally acceptable moral framework could face public backlash. For example, Jean Le Fèvre frames his late fourteenth-century Livre de Leesce, a verse-by-verse critique of Matheolus’s misogynistic Liber lamentationem, as a response to critics who read his earlier translation of the same work without commentary as an implicit endorsement of Matheolus’s vitriol against women.3 The medieval Bible translator, like the vernacular preacher, was doubly an interpres in Isidore’s definition, one who mediated both words and “mysteries,” or spiritual meanings, according to the perceived needs and aptitudes of a lay audience. The Bible [End Page 353] was translated into nearly all European vernaculars during the Middle Ages: in prose and in verse, in pictures and in stage plays, in canonically complete translations as well as summaries, fragments, and commentaries.4 Far from Walter Benjamin’s modern ideal of translation “without mediation of meaning,” medieval Bible translation was mediation of meaning.5 Guyart des Moulins’s 1295 Bible historiale, the most widely circulated French Bible translation of the Middle Ages, illustrates this well; its biblical text, translated from the Vulgate, is interspersed with and structured by a parallel translation of Peter Comestor’s historical exposition, the Historia Scholastica, and the whole is mediated by the translator’s first-person narration of his choices in compiling and arranging the work.6 The biblical text and its explication are given such equal weight that the translator hesitates over which to privilege in his title, ultimately offering two titles, Bible historiale or Histoires les escholastres. Often formatted as inline commentary, as opposed to blocks of text surrounded by marginal gloss, the mise-en-page of vernacular Bible manuscripts further decenters the biblical text and blurs the distinction between a text that contains interpretive glosses and an extended commentary that contains quotations of the scriptural passages it interprets.7 Practices of biblical exegesis did not carry over unchanged in the translation from Latin to the vernacular, from an audience trained in monastic lectio divina or scholastic disputatio to one cultivated by the literary habits of the French court. However, exegetical traditions did lay the groundwork for the ways in which vernacular texts could be read, circulated, and used. The scaffolded division of meaning into literal and spiritual senses not only allowed exegetes to negotiate points of contradiction and opacity, but also granted a degree of flexibility and creativity in translation, interpretation, and adaptation. Paradoxically, it also permitted commentators and translator-exegetes to ignore, deny, or suppress literal meanings in favor of tenuously supported spiritual interpretations that better supported a dogma, worldview, or individual argument. Within its vast body of commentary, including weekly oral homilies in the vernacular, the Bible circulated largely as short quotations within the context of hermeneutic argument. Units of biblical meaning—books, stories, parables, and proverbs—traveled into other vernacular texts where they would receive new glosses in the context of an author’s narrative or argument. In fact, citation became a primary means by...

Rater strategies for reaching agreement on pupil text quality

Novice members of a Norwegian national rater panel tasked with assessing Year 8 pupils’ written texts were studied during three successive preparation sessions (2011–2012). The purpose was to investigate how the raters successfully make use of different decision-making strategies in an assessment situation where pre-set criteria and standards give a rather strict framework. The data sources were the raters’ pair assessment dialogues. The analysis shows that the raters use a ‘shared standards strategy’, but when reaching agreement on text quality they also seem to make very good use of assessment strategies related to their work as writing teachers. Moreover, asymmetries in knowledge and participation among raters contribute to creating an image of writing assessment as a challenging hermeneutic practice. It is suggested that future rater preparation would gain from being attentive to the internalised assessment practices teachers bring to the fore when working as raters.

No Place Like Home; or, Dwelling in Narrative

This essay explores the intimate and immensely productive relation of belonging and narrative. It is concerned with belonging as an existential condition of human being, and with narrative as the quintessential mediator and enabler of that condition. As fundamental constituent of human being, so its main claim, narrative serves as a cultural resource of orientation and emplacement that sustains our being by giving voice and form. Thus understood, narrative becomes an indispensable and proactive component of dwelling in the world—a proposition that seeks to broaden interrogations of narrative “use” beyond matters of human temporality to include the intricate ways in which this human activity is distinctly invested in matters of space. In fact, if current work on space departs from the assumption that it has been released from its role as a stable backdrop for the dynamic operations of time, that it has itself become productive in the wake of the “spatial turn,” how does this new productivity of space intersect with that of narrative—especially when understood not primarily as the impersonal work of reality-forming structures, but as conflicted form of human agency mobilized through an existential uncertainty? Drawing from Heidegger’s concept of dwelling as a hermeneutical practice and from the notion of ontological narrativity recently posited in the social sciences, what can we say about narrative’s place making and building capacities? And what is the role that narrative art plays in this?

Patience as Hermeneutical Practice: Christ, Church, and Scripture in John Howard Yoder and Hans Frei

Modern TheologyVolume 31, Issue 4 p. 547-572 Article Patience as Hermeneutical Practice: Christ, Church, and Scripture in John Howard Yoder and Hans Frei Nathan Hershberger, Nathan Hershberger njh7cd@virginia.edu Mennonite Central Committee, PO Box 64 Ankawa 979 Erbil n/a, IRAQSearch for more papers by this author Nathan Hershberger, Nathan Hershberger njh7cd@virginia.edu Mennonite Central Committee, PO Box 64 Ankawa 979 Erbil n/a, IRAQSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 May 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12170Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume31, Issue4October 2015Pages 547-572 RelatedInformation

Dredging and projecting the depths of personality: the thematic apperception test and the narratives of the unconscious.

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was a projective psychological test created by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and his lover Christina Morgan in the 1930s. The test entered the nascent intelligence service of the United States (the OSS) during the Second World War due to its celebrated reputation for revealing the deepest aspects of an individual's unconscious. It subsequently spread as a scientifically objective research tool capable not only of dredging the unconscious depths, but also of determining the best candidate for a management position, the psychological complexes of human nature, and the unique characteristics of a culture. Two suppositions underlie the utility of the test. One is the power of narrative. The test entails a calculated abuse of the subjects tested, based on their inability to interpret their own narrative. The form of the test requires that a subject fail to decipher the coded, unconscious meaning their narrative reveals. Murray believed the interpretation of a subject's narrative and the projection contained therein depended exclusively on the psychologist. This view of interpretation stems from the seemingly more reasonable belief of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers that a literary text serves as a proxy for an author's deepest self. The TAT also supposes that there is something beyond consciousness closely resembling a psychoanalytic unconscious, which also has clear precedents in nineteenth-century German thought. Murray's views on literary interpretation, his view of psychology as well as the continuing prevalence of the TAT, signals a nineteenth-century concept of self that insists "on relations of depth and surface, inner and outer life" (Galison 2007, 277). It is clear the hermeneutic practice of Freud's psychoanalysis, amplified in Jung, drew on literary conceptions of the unconscious wider than those of nineteenth-century psychology.

What Do You Read When You Read a Religious Text?

In this essay some key characteristics of contemporary discourse on biblical hermeneutics and philosophical hermeneutics are identified. A redescriptive archaeology of hermeneutics is suggested. The key characteristics of hermeneutics are re-interpreted and critiqued in light of recent theories of religion and history. There are three domains of critical questions at issue in the open question posed to the practice of hermeneutics, namely 1) redescriptive theorising of religion as a social discourse; 2) the materiality of the tradition; and 3) revisioning history and the relationship to the past.

Vergleich als Methode? Zur Empirisierung eines philologischen Verfahrens im Zeitalter der Digital Humanities

Vergleich als Methode? Zur Empirisierung eines philologischen Verfahrens im Zeitalter der Digital Humanities

Temporalization and Ethical Action

This essay attempts to reconceptualize temporality as it relates to ethics, by interrupting dominant anthropological notions of time—most particularly the temporal coherence of narrative unity—which are homogeneous and empty. Eschewing the more commonly understood notion of anthropology as ethnographic thick description, this essay is a practice of anthropological hermeneutics by which I take a cue from my Muscovite interlocutors to disrupt dominant anthropological conceptions of temporal unity within which action is considered to take place, and in so doing, reveal temporalization as the process by which ethical action becomes possible.

Against Accumulation

Against Accumulation Brian Connolly (bio) We might, with a little work, productively imagine the archive as the historical unconscious, with the evidence therein the near endless series of signifiers. If we were to push this analogy a little further, we might say that the archive is structured like the unconscious (which is structured like language), and if this is the case, then we might be apprehensive about the relationship between the archive, evidence, and “the real,” or reality. The real, we know from the work of Jacques Lacan, is that which is foreclosed, impossible to be symbolized, and thus incapable of being represented in language. It is also undifferentiated, whole—the cut of signification (castration) does not exist there. It is that which we desire, that impossible place without lack. If this is the case, then the archive will never, no matter how much evidence we accumulate, yield reality. Yet, for all of this, recent accumulative trends in digitization of archives (more accessible evidence searched more easily) and extranational scales of analysis (which add geographic spaces in order to challenge the hegemony of the nation) have led to a neo-empiricism that, once again, chases that elusive phantasm of reality. In one sense, this empirical, positivist search for reality is not particularly new. Since at least the nineteenth century, the archive has been figured as the repository of documentary evidence. It was the institutional site where evidence could be found to document the veracity of historical narratives. Of course, this empiricist account of the archive has long been critiqued: think of Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever or Joan Scott in “The Evidence of Experience.” In some instances, the capacity of both evidence and the archive to satisfy our contemporary political desires is called into question, as in Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”1 For Scott, a critical relation to evidence shifts our work from “a belief in the unmediated relationship between words and things, to one that takes all categories of analysis as contextual, contested, and contingent.”2 In a word, Scott asks historians to acknowledge that we read evidence—we do not discover unmediated accounts of that elusive phantasm, the past “as it actually was.”3 Yet no matter how many critiques, empiricism persists. Recently, a confluence of technology, framework, and new practices of reading have resulted in a newfound fascination with an empirical [End Page 172] orientation toward evidence, one frequently offered as a substitute (or antidote) for now supposedly “tired” hermeneutics. The digitization of archives (and the attendant quasi-disciplinary formation we have come to call digital humanities) and global (and other extranational) studies have engendered an accumulative logic toward evidence and the archive.4 Supposedly, the more evidence we have the better, whether through the multiplication of pieces of evidence or the ability to search keywords across a previously unimaginable number of sources. This move has been accompanied by the emergence of new practices of reading—distant, surface, descriptive—that embrace a certain kind of empiricism—one designed, in part, to move across a large body of evidence, something at which older, tired, and out-of-date critical and hermeneutic practices would be less adept. Yet the digital and the global stand as sentries at the archive, orienting our analyses and capacities for critique. As Derrida wrote of the archons (those who secured the archive and its documents), “They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives.”5 The archons of the contemporary scene of historical writing might just be the digital humanities and the spatial turn. While there are certainly critical projects that come out of both domains—indeed, my own work has benefitted greatly from the digitization of archives—there is also a celebratory tone that is primarily about accumulation. Despite its insistent antihermeneutic logic, it is a hermeneutic imperative nonetheless—accumulate more and more, think beyond and against the nation, but always do it in a manner, aided and abetted by digitization, which adds rather than subtracts. The tendency among historians and others to lionize the digital...

Herbert w hermeneutycznej sieci

The author of this article discusses several books that were written by Artur Grabowski, a Cracow poet, critic and researcher who is an expert in the theory of poetry, theater, drama and contemporary art, by focusing on his latest book Herbert-Hermes. Konteksty nowoczesności w esejach, dramatach i wierszach Zbigniewa Herberta [Herbert-Hermes: The Contexts of Modernity in Zbigniew Herbert’s Essays, Dramas and Poems] (The Jagiellonian University Press, Cracow 2013). This book represents an original attempt at situating Herbert’s essays, selected poems and a drama (Jaskinia filozofow [The Cave of Philosophers]) in the context of interpretive, hermeneutic practice which is treated quite loosely, and it has been highly favorably reviewed. The author of the present article draws attention to the erudition and inventiveness of Artur Grabowski, who has managed to start a new thread of research on Herbert’s work, but she also challenges ideas presented in certain passages of the book.

States of Recollection: How Seventeenth-Century Women Thought about Recovery and the Atlantic World

Tn Muse: Gender, Rationality, and Marketing of Knowledge, .1Stephanie Jed asks important questions about practices and institutions of European discovery at moment when museums and curio cabinets were proliferating as depositories for New artifacts and wonders, but she also asks important questions about recovery. In urging us to think about how works of America's Tenth Muses--Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Anne Bradstreet--circulated transatlantically, she also urges us to suspend for a moment our own marveling at genius and resilience of these early American women poets and look more closely at roots of that wonder. At end of her essay, Jed imagines a seventeenth-century history' of literature from 'New World (206). Here she likens collecting of Muses to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's description in his Historia general y natural de las Indias of iguana that be shipped in a barrel of earth to chancellor of Signoria in Venice in order to find out if it ate dirt. (Apparently it did not.) Jed implies that works of extraordinary women in Americas likewise circulated as objects of inquiry, deracinated and apt to dry out and die in their new archival homes. In order to breathe new life into these texts, productively to engage, as she puts it, in the feminist project of producing new forms of relations and knowing, she urges us to recognize power relations structuring 'f-acts attributed to these texts and extending to present-day endeavors like Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (208). Jed's argument that Muse should be understood as a taxonomic category was groundbreaking, though it also risked overemphasizing powerlessness of women writers once their writings enter world. Texts are not iguanas, and writers of texts, even colonial dames and nuns, are engaging discourses and power structures within which their texts circulated in a way that poor iguana cannot, even if it were far more vicious than Oviedo reports. But what if we take Jed's fiction of a 'natural history' of literature from 'New World as a challenge and explore how women in seventeenth century can be understood to engage in corollaries to modern recovery projects? Women reported on New World, helped shape emerging scientific discourses, and understood themselves as agents within both commercial and religious global enterprises. Sometimes they reported on other women, and often they represented these women as unknown or forgotten. By examining how seventeenth-century women practiced recovery--that is, by considering efforts of women that came long before far more familiar post-Enlightenment endeavors of nineteenth-century women we are more apt to see as our scholarly precursors--we see how they not only participated in hermeneutical practices similar to our own but also helped to shape development of these hermeneutics. We gain a better critical perspective on their activities while bringing into focus some of colonial and imperial roots of our own discoveries and recoveries. The spiritual diary of Ursula de Jesus, an Afro-Peruvian mystic, in many ways exemplifies seventeenth-century recovery. Enslaved until age of forty, Ursula took vows as a donada, a convent servant, about a year after her manumission. She was already well known for her visions and had amanuenses assigned to record her diary; they occasionally offered asides in which they confessed, whether with humility or exasperation it is hard to say, their failures in recording all that Ursula said. In 2004, Nancy van Deusen produced an English edition with ample apparatus aimed at classroom use. For this recovery project she both transcribed neglected manuscripts from Convent of Santa Clara in Lima and translated and contextualized them for an English-speaking audience. (1) Ursula is therefore subject of recovery, and for those of us who collect early American women she is quite a find. …

Evaluation Advisory Groups

Evaluation (like applied social science research and social work research) exists to be practical. This means that its very being and certainly its job in the world is to be used—used to help individuals learn, assess, reflect, and be useful in imagining, proposing, deciding, and recommending whether and how to refine, improve, close, or otherwise respond to the realities of organized efforts to ‘‘make a difference’’ in the material and other worlds of individuals, groups, organizations, programs, or the like. It exists to repair (Spelman, 2002). To do this right and well requires facts, values, beliefs, and ideas which can be placed over against criteria of rightness, goodness, appropriateness, efficiency, and effectiveness so as to conclude that a process, practice intervention, activity was/was not consequential and effective, that is, whether it ‘‘worked,’’ and if so, in the ways expected and desired, without major, troubling, or other anticipated and unanticipated consequences on/for the same or other persons, things, or processes. Conventionally, these ideas have informed the creation of the now widely accepted standards of program evaluation (Yarbrough, Shulha, Hopson, & Caruthers, 2011). To do this work well requires technical competence, facts and other information, thought, and wisdom. Needed is both Aristotle’s epistome and phronesis—practical wisdom. Doing evaluation well—responsibly, with credibility means to do it accurately, fully, openly, transparently, with awareness of one’s stance, biases in all directions, strengths and limitations, along with those of one’s approach, methods, tools, and hermeneutic practices, at least. It can, indeed should, mean to include as a corrective and for utility, that is, for use, evaluation should reflect multiple perspectives be multivocal, and include the ways of seeing, knowing, and doing, as well as the content of what is seen, known, and done, of multiple others, those with interest in what is being evaluated, how the evaluation is undertaken and completed, and how it can and well be used—for policy, program improvement, decision making, and conceptual clarification and refinement. The involvement of others can be as respondents, informants, observers, evaluation workers, or as advisers. Our focus here is on the latter. Advice is a primordial, socio-intellectual process—a system of soliciting and providing, of asking others for ‘‘input’’—perspective, technical ‘‘know how,’’ thoughts, and meanings. And of deciding whether or not to use what is offered. Advice is a way to help correct one’s limitations, or a way to solicit support, a way to increase the likelihood that a study will meet its life purpose by being used in the everyday world in ways practical, useful, meaningful, and consequential. Most researchers, including evaluators, bring advice to their work. This can be in the form of solicited and unsolicited others or interior self-inquiry—reflective practice, where one interrogates oneself to ensure, self-consciously, that one’s biases are explicit and clear; this is one way to minimize the errors brought by arrogance, incompetence, or normal human failing. Like all advice, it can prove preventive and corrective. Less common and the focus of this essay is the inclusion of advice using formal structures—groups, such as an advisory committee or council, or individuals, who can offer consultations and technical assistance on the evaluation enterprise, from contract through research to report and use. A review of the literature on the use of advisory structures in social work research texts shows that, just as with the literature on advisory structures in evaluation research texts, more is hortatory than practical, far more promotes this practice than describes, suggests, or evaluates advisory structures. Here are the two literature reviews. Both literature reviews used a similar method. Texts were found using general searches in Google Scholar, Google, Amazon.com, and the University of Minnesota library system. Publisher-specific searchers were also run on major evaluation and social work publishers. Text book indexes and table of contents were initially searched for the phrases: advice, advisory, advisory board, advisory committee, advisory group, steering committee, committee, and working group. Full text searches were made of texts available on Google Books (http://books. google.com). When such titles were available in table of contents, texts were also searched for phrases like ‘‘stakeholder engagement,’’ ‘‘advisory board,’’ ‘‘participatory evaluation,’’ ‘‘evaluation management,’’ and so forth. Few textbooks and handbooks available at the time of this survey (2011–2012) included the mention of evaluation or research advisory boards/groups/committees. No specific sections of any books examined contain specific or substantive

An alienated mind dreaming for integration: Constrained cosmopolitanism in Wumingshi’s ‘Modern Literati Novel’

Mainstream scholarship on Wumingshi – a marginal figure in modern Chinese literary history, but a very popular writer in the 1940s – interprets his writings as ‘neo-romanticism’, ‘late romanticism’ or ‘popular modernism’. This study, through the practice of political hermeneutics, contends that his works are in fact an example of ‘modern literati fiction’ or ‘fiction of ideas’ – a sort of middlebrow fiction for the popular culture market of modern China.

Titus , Broadway, and Disney’s Magic Capitalism; or, the Wonderful World of Julie Taymor

Anderson argues that corporate or media allegory as a hermeneutic practice offers necessary context for understanding creative production and that, in the case of Julie Taymor’s film Titus , it alters how we might view the film’s representation of historical, cultural, and familial relationships. Anderson claims that the film extends Shakespeare’s ambivalence over a Roman cultural and religious inheritance to her own position as an inheritor of two legacies—one, the historical avant-garde and two, the wonderful world of Disney. In making Titus her first film after the considerable success of her Disney collaboration The Lion King , Taymor delegitimizes her corporate partnership by symbolically disowning her Disney past: like young Lucius at the end of the film who walks into pixilated sunrise and away from what has become a Roman mausoleum, the director rejects Disney’s powerful corporate legacy that promises to shape the reception of her avant-garde work.

(Anti)Hermeneutical Philosophy for Science

Philosophical hermeneutics claims that human understanding, while being contingent and historical, is likewise universal and bears within itself some pervasive features detectable via hermeneutical analyses of historically imparted tradition and language. Similarly, hermeneutical philosophy of science is confident that hermeneutical methods are the only proper tool to adequately assess, reconstruct, explain or give a meaning to historical but universal scientific knowledge and its various forms. I point out two versions of hermeneutical philosophy of science and argue that whenever philosophical hermeneutics pursues rescuing "scientificity", human rationality, human rights, common values, and so forth under the pretence of its universality and competence, it necessarily transcends and violates the tenets of its own. I conclude in the favour of moderate interpretation of practical hermeneutics, perhaps in the very essence of it rest postmodern concepts of historicality, transparency and tolerance, without which there is no possibility of extricating oneself from hermeneuticism.