Textual Hermeneutics Research Articles

Joyce Ann Zimmerman's 'Text Hermeneutics' Approach to Liturgical Studies

Joyce Ann Zimmerman's 'Text Hermeneutics' Approach to Liturgical Studies

Book Reviews

Cain Hope Felder, ed., Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, reviewed by Grant LeMarquand Stanley N. Rosenbaum, Amos of Israel: A New Interpretation, reviewed by Brian P. Irwin Christiaan Beker, The Triumph of God: The Essence of Paul's Thought, reviewed by L. Ann Jervis J. Andrew Overman, Matthew's Gospel and Formative Judaism: The Social World of the Matthean Community, reviewed by Michael P. Knowles G.R. Evans and J. Robert Wright, The Anglican Tradition: A Handbook of Sources, reviewed by Alan L. Hayes William Janzen, Limits on Liberty: The Experience of Mennonite, Hutterite, and Doukhobor Communities in Canada, reviewed by Marlene Epp Mark S. Massa, Charles Augustus Briggs and the Crisis of Historical Criticism, reviewed by Marion Taylor Elizabeth Rapley, The Devotes: Women and the Church in Seventeenth-Century France, reviewed by Helje Porn! Margeurite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathaniel Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839-1918, reviewed by Tom Sinclair-Faulkner Joyce Ann Zimmerman, Liturgy as Language of Faith: A Liturgical Methodology in the Mode of Paul Ricoeur's Textual Hermeneutics, reviewed by James O'Regan Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christogy in Messianic Dimensions, reviewed by 3

Raymond Williams: Feeling for Structures, Voicing "History"

How else could we entitle that word now, except in speechmarks, under the sign of vocative instability, outside any assumed consensus? As perhaps the most over-employed item in the vocabulary of literary-critical and cultural analysis, may well also be the least decisive. We return to history, work toward history, and espouse a historical method, but few of us can say exactly what we mean by history, except in the most gestural way. Those of us who worry about it at all find ourselves necessarily mired in complex theoretical retractions and modifications, bewildering enough to sponsor some fairly radical insecurities. Others, sensing a probable dead-end street, run for the cover of the kind of new historicism that looks to history as to a safe and approved harbor, a place where one may sleep peacefully, lulled by anecdotal stories, after tossing on the stormy seas of deconstructive and theoretical Marxist uncertainty. In Keywords, Raymond Williams had a go at saying not what history is but what it has been taken to mean, and he offered a compromise, if not quite a solution, in the particularities of showing and telling, ostension and invocation: History itself retains its whole range, and still, in different hands, teaches or shows us most kinds of knowable past and almost every kind of imaginable future.' The urgency of history is not, then, in its wholeness or totality but in its immediate applicability to a range of options for reading the past and projecting the future. It instructs and points out; it is part of the present. In the saddest and most untimely sense of the word, Raymond Williams himself is now history, and in the aftermath of his death one feels a temptation to believe in the possibility of saying something final about him, about his place in history, his understanding of history, even, perhaps, about Raymond Williams and history, in the grandest of senses. This is of course an illusion. Even the most minimally sophisticated and merely textual hermeneutics suffices to warn us that the object will shift in accordance with the various kinds of attention that are focused upon it. And Williams's texts are unusually polyphonous both in their genres (novels, criticism, political journalism, etc.) and in the flexibility of their subject positions and discursive attitudes (inside and outside Marxism, Leavisism, the Labour Party, literary theory, and so on). There will be a

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Liturgy as Language of Faith: A Liturgical Methodology in the Mode of Paul Ricoeur's Textual Hermeneutics. By Joyce Ann Zimmerman. University Press of America, 1988. 265 pages. $25.50. Michael B. Aune Michael B. Aune Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary Graduate Theological Union Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LVIII, Issue 4, Winter 1990, Pages 733–736, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LVIII.4.733 Published: 01 December 1990

Desire in Language (review)

Reviews215 its relation to notions like faith, knowledge, opinion, feeling, thought is never carefully examined. The wider the field she makes "belief coextensive with — truth, commitment, meaning — the more doubtful it becomes. Indeed, it must be asked why one of the other prestige terms does not far better deserve this position. By the end of the book, it names the whole of worldly being: "Belief is ajudgment, linguistically expressed as having a selfreferent and an object-referent, about a possible world and way ofbeing-in-the-world" (p. 296). This definition pivots on the widely questioned model of consciousness and subjectivity , subject-object metaphysics, expressivist and propositional conceptions of language. It is part of Ricoeur's aim, whether he succeeds, to surmount this model through a hermeneutics of texts and their power to open up a world. Gerhart would like to believe that all the main points in Ricoeur's later hermeneutics can be rephrased in the language of belief. She concedes that Ricoeur himself neglects to explore "belief as a phenomenon ... in its own right" (p. 236), and that what she wants, namely a "discrete phenomenology of belief (p. 252), with some assist from MerleauPonty , goes contra Ricoeur. What appeals to her in Ricoeur's work is the promise of supplying a foundation (p. 143), which is what phenomenology can do (p. 151), and although she acknowledges the hermeneutic shift where language and textuality come to the fore, this shift does not affect "his foundational philosophy" (p. 174). In this, too, of course, she stands opposed to Ricoeur's own explicit claims (pp. 191 , 193). In any case, one thing that this author fails to learn: hermeneutics does not centralize and found the problem of "belief." Its effect is rather to dislocate, split up, and subvert all foundationalisms. A critical study of Ricoeur's recent and arguably most important work has yet to be written. Vassar CollegeMichael Murray Desire in Language, by Julia Kristeva; edited by Leon S. Roudiez; translated by Roudiez, Thomas Gora and AliceJardine; xi & 305 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, $16.95. The split between Derrida and Tel Quel was widely interpreted as political. Derrida was speaking with the French Communist Party when his colleagues were already looking to China. But there was also a philosophical reason. This was the disagreement between Derrida and Kristeva, the other theoretician of the group, over the feasibility of theoretical discourse. Roudiez's collection in English of early essays culled from S,?µa???? and Polylogue indicates that the argument subsisted from the very beginning. Kristeva begins like Derrida with a critique of referential theories of meaning, particularly the signifier/signified distinction. Their shared belief is that the signified cannot be specified independently of some signifier. So it, and any referent determining the sense of signifying acts, is a "metaphysical" entity which should be dropped from modern thought. Appropriateness of signification is governed by a set of constantly changing rules for the concatenation of signifiers. 216Philosophy and Literature At this point Kristeva and Derrida part ways. Derrida believes that all discourse is nonreferential and that a philosophy aware of this fact would have to give over its univocal status and write in a more "scriptural" (i.e., mythical) way. The most referential of (primarily) philosophical texts can be shown to generate terms not in imitation of some external reality so much as by a sort of metaphor production. Equally, Derrida argues that it is impossible to completely forego a referential core, and texts which claim to have "liberated" the signifier are deluded. He sees this impossibility as a fault of our metaphysical conceptual scheme, which might be overcome if some unforseeable seachange in consciousness were to occur. Kristeva reserves a place for theoretical texts. She alludes to Derrida in speaking of the "post-Heideggerian temptation" of "identifying theoretical discourse with that of art" (p. ix). She argues that expository discourse can accompany the almost pure metaphor of the poetic revolution. Thus she takes care to distinguish the status of her texts from poetic language. The enthusiasm for Derrida in this country was partly motivated by irritation at the excessive scientism the first structuralist wave had brought. Equally, the place Kristeva...

Hermeneutics of Texts and Hermeneutics of Action

rT ZaiHE QUESTION of the relationship of the of texts and the of actions is primarily a question of what both have in common. What common output, what common structure, fits the interpretation of texts and the interpretation (i.e., the systematic understanding) of actions, either those of others or my own? The question seems burdened from the start with a special difficulty. This difficulty results from the fact that, in light of the extreme variability of texts, the express or tacit difference of their intentions, their form of expression, etc., it is not at all easy say in general what it means to interpret a text. What is there in common between the interpretation of a poetic art object and that of a chapter from the Critique of Pure Reason? Even more, a general difficulty is added this special one. Within its own tradition, hermeneutics is almost exclusively identified with text interpretation, so that the question of the relationship of the of texts and that of actions appears from the start in the light of a false anticipation. The of actions appears possible only insofar as action is at least linked a verbal manifestation, i.e., either verbally presented with respect intention, choice of means, accompanying circumstances, etc., or else entirely subsumed in a verbal manifestation. Otherwise, the maxim holds that while all speech is action, not all action is verbally manifested. How should action be interpreted when it is not presented through language? That speech is a possible paradigm for action has as little force against this as that there is a type of of actions, namely, biography and autobiography, that has repeatedly served as a paradigm for hermeneutic practice ever since Dilthey. Thus the verdict seems be spoken about the possibility of a of actions and hence too the verdict about the relationship of the of actions text hermeneutics. Indeed, actions cannot be interpreted so long as they neither represent themselves in some fashion nor can be preserved and passed