Literary Hermeneutics Research Articles

Traditional Segregation: Encoded Language as Powerful Tool. Insights from Okǝti Ụmụakpo-Lejja Ọmaba chant

Abstract Language becomes a tool for power and segregation when it functions as a social divider among individuals. Language creates a division between the educated and uneducated, an indigene and non-indigene of a place; an initiate and uninitiated member of a sect. Focusing on the opposition between expressions and their meanings, this study examines Ụmụakpo-Lejja Okǝti Ọmaba chant, which is a heroic and masculine performance that takes place in the Okǝti (masking enclosure of the deity) of Umuakpo village square in Lejja town of Enugu State, Nigeria. The mystified language promotes discrimination among initiates, non-initiates, and women. Ọmaba is a popular fertility Deity among the Nsukka-Igbo extraction and Egara Ọmaba (Ọmaba chant) generally applies to the various chants performed to honour the deity during its periodical stay on earth. Using Schleiermacher’s Literary Hermeneutics Approach of the methodical practice of interpretation, the metaphorical language of the performance is interpreted to reveal the thoughts and the ideology behind the performance in totality. Among the Findings is that the textual language of Ụmụakpo-Lejja Okǝti Ọmaba chant is almost impossible without authorial and member’s interpretation and therefore, they are capable of initiating discriminatory perception of a non-initiate as a weakling or a woman.

Ursúa, historia de una ficción

Ursúa es la primera novela del escritor colombiano William Ospina que da inicio a su trilogía del Amazonas, inscrita en el género de la Nueva Novela Histórica. Dentro de este escenario narrativo, el autor construye una mirada distinta del proceso de conquista y colonización del territorio americano, a través de la vida del conquistador navarro Pedro de Ursúa. En esta obra se hipertextualizan relatos polifónicos, protagonizados por personajes históricos y ficticios; hechos que, visto desde un enfoque semiótico, evidencian la historia y la ficción como realidades sígnicas. En efecto, la hermenéutica literaria se decodificará a partir de la teoría semiótica del filósofo norteamericano Charles Sanders Peirce, con el fin de encontrar una vía de acceso a los diferentes niveles interpretativos del relato literario e historiográfico.

ЕВРОПА ВА ЎЗБЕК ТАРЖИМАШУНОСЛИГИТАРАҚҚИЁТИ(1991-2019 ЙИЛЛАР)

This article is devoted to the study of history and development of translation studies and the analysis of published scientific works in Uzbekistan during the years of independence. The author also examines historical factors which impacted the development and formation of Translation studies as a science in Europe and Uzbekistan. The article addresses general views of Western and Uzbek scholars on such problems as the linguistic theory of translation, textual interpretation of translation, theoretical framework of literary translation, hermeneutics, communicative translation and main criteria of translation.

Жіночі образи у медичному дискурсі автобіографічної романістики США

The aim of the research is to develop the typology and examine the features of women’s representations in the US literary works, focused on medical problematics.The research methodology is based on the application of modern literary studies in the fields of narratology, receptive aesthetics and literary hermeneutics. The paper analyses the author’s intentions and the role of the reader’s reception of medical discourse through the prism of gender studies and feminist literary criticism. We analyse the semi-autobiographical prose works by the American writers: “The Snake Pit” (1946) by Mary Jane Ward, “The Bell Jar” (1963) by Sylvia Plath, and “Prozac Nation” (1994) by Elizabeth Wurtzel. The theoretical significance of the research consists in the disclosure of women’s representations in the American literary and medical discourse in the diachronic focus. We examine the role of women as physicians, the peculiarities of representing women as nurses, as well as the narrative role of women as patients. The research is the first scientific attempt to examine the peculiarities of narrative representation of women in the literary and medical discourse of the US prose. The research demonstrates the transformation of women’s representations in the analysed novels, which directly reflects the emancipation tendencies over the course of the 20th century. These changes are naturally displayed in the narrative configuration of the prose works under consideration. The study of medical problems in a literary work through the prism of narratology and receptive aesthetics reveales the author’s intentionality and dimensions of the reader’s reception, as well as enables us to re-consider the socio-cultural phenomena, such as illness and health, norm and pathology. The results of the study will improve the content of training courses in the world literature and form a methodological basis for the development of special courses, theme-based seminars and academic syllabi.

Between the Cyclic Text – Context

Hermeneutics is chiefly related to the discipline of interpretation of a specific body of texts. The process of interpretation of literary texts hermeneutically is regarded as the consequence of the academic arena. It is a fact that literary hermeneutics shares mutual threads with various schools of literary criticism but what sets it apart from literary criticism proper are its philosophical leanings and its self reflexive and meta-critical character. Thus, this study is an attempt to concentrate on the application of hermeneutics to literary texts. It does reread Thomas Hardy’s most distinguished tragic novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) with the interpretive procedure of the hermeneutic circle as developed by Schleiermacher, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The study also examines the relationship between the text – context, and how they both occur as a dialogical space; and how this space of the text exists as a route of interpretation the part (Tess) and the whole (text).

On Bruno Schulz’s Demythologization of Reality

The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 62, issue 1 (2014).
 This article is an attempt at an analysis of the changes occurring in the area of Schulz’s narrative identity that is being constituted. It is assumed that the turning point for Schulz’s personal myth was first of all the success of The Street of Crocodiles and a number of events in his personal life (splitting up with his fiancée, his brother’s death, his health problems). Each of these factors starts to influence, in its own way, the writer’s questioning of the possibility to continue writing, that is, interpreting the world, discovering history, “making reality sensible.” The success of The Street of Crocodiles becomes a challenge that is difficult to respond to in these new conditions. The writer’s “brilliant epoch,” the epoch of “writing for himself,” comes to an end. The “Schulz” issue is in danger of sinking into oblivion. The narrative space is gradually transformed into a space of coping with alienation, division, loneliness. These motifs are articulated in a special way in the stories Dodo, The Pensioner, and Loneliness. If, in these stories, overcoming failure in life is indeed impossible (Dodo) or proceeds owing to “sponging off somebody [else]’s life” (The Pensioner), or “parasitizing metaphors” (Loneliness), in The Homeland the rewriting of an individual myth ab origine takes place. The act of this “rewriting” is understood as consequently departing from the basic principles of Schulz’s literary hermeneutics and philosophy of literature. The reality appearing as a result of this departure is a reality that is not rooted in genuine experience, a quasi-reality of “negative values,” a reality of a narrative disaster signaling the definitive “death of Bruno the Great.”

Hermeneutics from Exegesis to Aesthetics: Towards Establishing Key Principles for Literary Hermeneutics

Reading the literary text is a two-way interactive process between the reader and the text. This process occurs through a triangular interaction between three factors: the reader, the text, and the cultural atmosphere of this text. In this interaction, the reader’s role is not negative but it is very active and vital, as he ⁄she has to work on making up the text’s meaning. Thus, the text’s interpretation is not solid process; it changes according to certain criteria. Like the Alexandrite gemstone, whose color varies according to the surrounded circumstances, the text is always open to many possible interpretations.

Educación y diversidad: Interpretación de El Huésped, de Guadalupe Nettel

El presente artículo es producto de una investigación sobre la pertinencia de la hermenéutica literaria en la formación de profesionales de la educación. Esta orientación de la lectura de textos literarios se considera idónea como enfoque filosófico que se aplica a los fines de la educación. Es decir, se interesa en atender a la pregunta por el tipo de ser humano cuya formación se promueve a través de la lectura. Como productos de la indagación se elaboran estudios críticos sobre narrativa literaria como propuestas de lectura que, a través de la interpretación, apoyen la construcción de valores con la mediación cultural que propicia la narrativa literaria. El tema específico en el cual se centra la reflexión es la formación de valores de sensibilidad hacia la diversidad. En el presente trabajo se intenta una comprensión de las personas con ceguera como diversidad ontológica que tiene repercusiones en la condición sociocultural de quienes se encuentran en esta circunstancia. La obra narrativa que se interpreta desde esta perspectiva es la novela El Huésped, de la escritora mexicana Guadalupe Nettel. El análisis de la novela está centrado en la comprensión de la transformación del personaje narrador en su proceso de debilitamiento visual que la involucra en un mundo de marginación de los sujetos que viven en esta diversidad. La metodología utilizada corresponde al enfoque de la hermenéutica de Giorgio Agamben con la teoría de las signaturas, como análisis del discurso, así como a la teoría narrativa de la hermenéutica de Paul Ricoeur, en el seguimiento de la trayectoria del personaje.

La hermenéutica literaria de Michel Foucault

El objetivo de este estudio es analizar los rasgos de la hermenéutica literaria de Michel Foucault en los textos sobre literatura en el período que llega hasta 1970. Este trabajo muestra cómo su hermenéutica literaria comparte una misma raíz con su arqueología. Para ello, primero, se va a partir de una aproximación al privilegio otorgado a la lectura en el proyecto metodológico foucaultiano, para después analizar particularmente las repercusiones de este proyecto metodológico en el ámbito literario y poder describir así la especificidad de su hermenéutica literaria. La hermenéutica literaria de Foucault no deja de estar vinculada al análisis del texto. Por este motivo, los rasgos fundamentales de la hermenéutica ontológica de la literatura foucaultiana van a ser descritos en relación a su obra Raymond Roussel.

The Harmonizing Power of Poetic Language, Between Mimesis and Catharsis

Rationally, to clarify the genesis and the resonant power of the (poetic) language implies two pluridisciplinary perspectives, namely: a) the contributions of semiotics, phonology and linguistic, neuro-physiology and biophotonics, in order to justify the mimetic dimension of the words by its sonorous signifier; b) the contributions of psycho-logics and psycho-analysis connected to literary hermeneutics, able to explain how the mental images and thoughts are becoming emotional states by the "lighted" signified of the words. The both perspectives are (auto)referentially connected – for a more explicit illustration – to the poetic / metaphoric language used by the authors. In this integrative way, the paper is complex, acknowledging the assumption of sufi thinkers that our words are "sounds full of light".

СМИСЛОТВОРЧИЙ ПОТЕНЦІАЛ МОВЧАННЯ У СУЧАСНОМУ ЛІТЕРАТУРНО-МЕДИЧНОМУ ДИСКУРСІ

The article aims to analyse the receptive and semantic potential of silence based on the novel “Critical Condition” (2002) by the contemporary Canadian-American physician, writer Peter Clement. The research methodology is based on the application of modern literary studies in the fields of narratology, receptive aesthetics and literary hermeneutics. The theoretical significance of the research consists in the disclosure of the narrative category of silence in the modern American literary and medical discourse. The results of the study will improve the content of training courses in the world literature and form a methodological basis for the development of special courses, theme-based seminars and academic syllabi. In the course of the study, it was found that silence within the analysed literary work symbolizes the epistemological and communicative crisis of language. The author’s intentions and receptive resource of silence in the text have been analysed. The leading role of facial expressions as a means of exteriorizing the silence effect in the “doctor — patient” communicative situation has been observed. The patient’s silence in the novel is associated with the author’s rethinking of the phenomena of illness and disability, thus stimulating the reader to embrace the active position of co-creation and receptive cooperation by filling-in the narrative “gaps” of the text. Further research is needed to study the role of the reader’s reception in constructing the silence in the “doctor — patient”communicative situation, as exemplified by the literary and medical discourse of the US prose.

Reading for the Political Plot: A Genealogy of Disaffection

This essay examines a single article of colonial law—Section 124a, which outlawed "disaffection"—to argue for the centrality of seemingly arcane details of imperial history to our embattled present. The notion of political disaffection that grew out of its criminalization in British India necessitated a racial theory of what counted as criticism and, through the practice of trial law, put a range of literary-critical strategies into play in order to ascertain whether specific instances of Indian writing were (detached) criticism or (embodied) disaffection. In examining how this racialization was theorized and put into practice, I demonstrate how this history prefigures a number of contemporary literary and political concerns, including civility, the status of free speech in a state of emergency, political affects, and literary hermeneutics.

Der arme Verwandte am Tisch: Die kritische Hermeneutik von Peter Szondi und der jüdische Literaturbegriff

The aim of this paper is to examine critically Peter Szondi’s literary hermeneutics from the perspective of his “huphainologic” concept, which stems from the Aristotle-inspired poetological character of this hermeneutics. In order to perform this task, I seek to answer the question whether Szondi’s text- and scriptocentrism is not a consequence of its neglect of the Jewish exegetical tradition. For the sake of giving an adequate analysis of problems raised by this question, I contrast the occidental, text-centered concept of Revelation with its oriental counterpart based on consonant script. As a next step, in this context, I give an outline of the reading- and interpretation-centred concept of Scripture characteristic of the period of Tannaim, touching upon the topic of middot (the methods or principles used by rabbinical hermeneutics), as well as exploring the dynamic nature and exegetical creativity of the reading- and interpretation-centred approach to Hebrew Revelation.

Interpretation in einer buchlosen Gesellschaft: Einleitung zu den Vorträgen der Tagung über philologische Erkenntnis von Peter Szondi

This study was written for lectures at a Szondi conference in 2016, and is based on an evaluation of the Hungarian and contemporary European afterlife of Peter Szondi’s work, as well as a reconsideration of his literary hermeneutics and approach to philology in view of the contemporary horizon of post-hermeneutics. The study pays special attention to questions that still concern critics today, including the relationship between interpretation and philology, the contemporary debate surrounding the referentiality of literary texts, and the principles of reading poetry. Following up on the lectures of the conference, the second part of the study identifies two fields in Szondi’s work that currently enjoy priority: one is Szondi’s link to the post-war generation of Jewish intellectuals, while the other is the possibility of reinterpreting his theory of drama.

"Sentidos del sujeto": la hermenéutica retroactiva de Judith Butler

In Senses of the Subject (2016), Judith Butler argues that the subject’s ability to account for himself, a subject that according to her theory is already established before his own birth, is based on the literary models that present the characters recounting their own birth. This “impossible perspective” allows the subject to overcome two limits of the narration of oneself: the temporal and the logical- causal. The hypothesis of this article is that we find in the basis of the hermeneutics of the subject that Judith Butler proposes a hermeneutic of the literary text, which entails the revision of the Aristotelian Concepts of mimesis and verisimilitude. Judith Butler’s contribution to literary hermeneutics would have been to found her hermeneutics of the subject in a retroactive literary hermeneutics, close to Judith Revel’s hermeneutics of discontinuity, and not in the line of the discourse that is governed by the dialectics of cause and effect.

"Patonómica": Aby Warburg o la filología de las imágenes

This article aims to develop a philological approach to Aby Warburg’s work by propounding a theory that, defined as Pathonomica, allows of taking a step from Iconology toward Literary Hermeneutics, bringing closer the semiotic relationship between space and time arts. A particular attention is given to Warburg’s “Pathos Formula” and his principles of orientation, repetition, and distance, all of them defined as linguistic devices, as well as to the orality of interjections, which are comparable to the engrams produced by the emotive experience of images. The propose is twofold: on the one hand, and following a line already drawn by Georges Didi-Huberman, we attempt to demonstrate the fruitful opening of hermeneutical possibilities of Warburg’s ideas about the liaison between life and word that holds the image; and, on the other hand, to point to a new interpretative way that may constitute a principle to further research into the expression of emotions in literary texts.

La hermenéutica dialéctica de Peter Szondi

This paper aims to expose the theoretical proposal for an art of the current interpretation that Peter Szondi elaborated in his Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics. Through the analysis of authors such as Chladenius, Meier or Schleiermacher, Szondi tries to find a reconciliation between philology and aesthetics, between procedures that aspire to a general theory of comprehension, and rules that can be adapted to the different peculiarities of each text. A proposal that, in contrast to the scientific model adopted in the human sciences of the last century, bets on the specificity of the socalled sciences of the spirit.

Una aplicación de la hermenéutica de Paul Ricoeur a la narrativa audiovisual: "mímesis" y autoconocimento

This article is an application proposal of Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et recit literary hermeneutics to the audiovisual narrative. I follow the path started by Brenes (Recepcion poetica del cine: una aproximacion al mundo de Frank Capra) and Garcia- Noblejas (Poetica del texto audiovisual) in their literary works. I start with a brief explanation of the three moments that Ricoeur establishes for the interpretation of narrative texts: prefiguration, configuration and refiguration. Next, I propose its application to Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. I conclude with the verification of the transfer of the written text to the audiovisual text. That is, it can be asserted that it is susceptible of application, with a few channel specific minor exceptions.

Sobre la interpretación en Barthes: hacia una hermenéutica plural

This paper takes a stand against the commonplace understanding of Roland Barthes as indifferent or even hostile to interpretation; on the contrary, he is to be credited with having made one of the most relevant contributions to literary hermeneutics in the 20th century. The main hypothesis is that Barthes kept himself at a distance from structuralist scientificism, in order to leave room for the task of literary criticism and consequently for interpretation. Besides, I suggest understanding Criticism and Truth as an explicit hermeneutical turn in Barthes’s work, under the influence of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the symbol. Lastly, Barthes’s rectification of his concept of literary criticism in S/Z comes to the foreground. S/Z contains the most developed and decisive contribution by Barthes to the theory of literary interpretation. By showing the internal necessity of such an evolution in Barthes’s work, the paper aims at shedding light on the desideratum –still pending– of a hermeneutics specifically adapted not only to the plural of the contemporary text but also to the plurality or rather multiplicity of literary ecritures and poetics.

Postmodernism in Tatar Prose: The Main Features

The topicality of the problem is explained by the fact that the problem of post-modernism in the context of national literature still raises many questions which solving becomes necessary. The article aims to identify the specifics of the Tatar postmodern prose, determine its typology. The main methods for the study of this problem is systemati?-stru?tural, literary hermeneutics and methods of receptive aesthetics. The main result of the article is the statement that postmodern artistry paradigm is represented in Tatar literature in two ways: firstly, in the ?on?eptual-semanti? level of the texts defining the forms of the author’s position expressions, often performing only as a function of the text, and secondly, as poetics techniques integrated with other elements of the art systems, especially of modernism. Article submissions may be useful for determining the content and scope of the term postmodernism as a phenomenon of national literary-historical process.