Hermeneutic Commentaries

ISSN: 1043-5735

"The question of “interpretation” of the text is at the center of this collection of monographs and commentaries on classical literatures. Interpretation starts with the realisation that at the outset, the sense of a text is an hypothesis to be gradually and constantly revised and ascertained. Grammar, syntax, and rhetoric are certainly the necessary part for this critical operation, but they fall short of giving full sense to the signification of the text. A philological commentary establishes the texts as close as possible to the author’s text, and provides the information necessary for modern readers to understand what the text meant to its contemporary users. But besides the impossibility of achieving this task fully, this sort of information does not provide the sense of the text as it opens itself to the questions of its individuality and universality, its historicity and its transhistorical iterability, as it hides the rules and game of its composition, its difference in order to show its identity. These opposite poles are constantly united and create a tension, a continuous oscillation that are the very domaine of the interpretative analysis, and the conditions of the text’s ever emerging sense . The hermeneutic circle, through which the critical hypothesis is constantly revised and made more precise, can be viewed also as a sort of deconstructive operation, a decomposing of the text in order to recompose it around its now discovered rules and games, of which the author is not necessarily always fully aware. Because of these conditions the sense of a text is more open to the critics than to its author; this point makes the critics conscious that as they are “reading”, they are in some way “writing” the text." "The question of “interpretation” of the text is at the center of this collection of monographs and commentaries on classical literatures. Interpretation starts with the realisation that at the outset, the sense of a text is an hypothesis to be gradually and constantly revised and ascertained. Grammar, syntax, and rhetoric are certainly the necessary part for this critical operation, but they fall short of giving full sense to the signification of the text. A philological commentary establishes the texts as close as possible to the author’s text, and provides the information necessary for modern readers to understand what the text meant to its contemporary users. But besides the impossibility of achieving this task fully, this sort of information does not provide the sense of the text as it opens itself to the questions of its individuality and universality, its historicity and its transhistorical iterability, as it hides the rules and game of its composition, its difference in order to show its identity. These opposite poles are constantly united and create a tension, a continuous oscillation that are the very domaine of the interpretative analysis, and the conditions of the text’s ever emerging sense . The hermeneutic circle, through which the critical hypothesis is constantly revised and made more precise, can be viewed also as a sort of deconstructive operation, a decomposing of the text in order to recompose it around its now discovered rules and games, of which the author is not necessarily always fully aware. Because of these conditions the sense of a text is more open to the critics than to its author; this point makes the critics conscious that as they are “reading”, they are in some way “writing” the text." "The question of “interpretation” of the text is at the center of this collection of monographs and commentaries on classical literatures. Interpretation starts with the realisation that at the outset, the sense of a text is an hypothesis to be gradually and constantly revised and ascertained. Grammar, syntax, and rhetoric are certainly the necessary part for this critical operation, but they fall short of giving full sense to the signification of the text. A philological commentary establishes the texts as close as possible to the author’s text, and provides the information necessary for modern readers to understand what the text meant to its contemporary users. But besides the impossibility of achieving this task fully, this sort of information does not provide the sense of the text as it opens itself to the questions of its individuality and universality, its historicity and its transhistorical iterability, as it hides the rules and game of its composition, its difference in order to show its identity. These opposite poles are constantly united and create a tension, a continuous oscillation that are the very domaine of the interpretative analysis, and the conditions of the text’s ever emerging sense . The hermeneutic circle, through which the critical hypothesis is constantly revised and made more precise, can be viewed also as a sort of deconstructive operation, a decomposing of the text in order to recompose it around its now discovered rules and games, of which the author is not necessarily always fully aware. Because of these conditions the sense of a text is more open to the critics than to its author; this point makes the critics conscious that as they are “reading”, they are in some way “writing” the text."

1 publications

Regensburger Arbeiten zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Regensburg Studies in British and American Languages and Cultures

The series Regensburg Studies in British and American Languages and Cultures was established in 1971 and publishes studies on the languages, literatures and cultures of North America, the British Isles, as well as the English-speaking regions of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Caribbean. Within a transhistorical, transnational and interdisciplinary conceptual framework, the monographs in this series have stressed different areas of focus in their engagement with textual, performative, visual, material and virtual forms of representation. Recent subjects of investigation have been, for instance, language variation and varieties of English as well as the representation and enactment of regional, (trans)national and global identities. Die Buchreihe Regensburger Arbeiten zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik besteht seit 1971 und publiziert Studien zu den Sprachen, Literaturen und Kulturen Nordamerikas, der britischen Inseln sowie der englischsprachigen Regionen Afrikas, Asiens, Ozeaniens und der Karibik. Transhistorisch, transnational und interdisziplinär ausgerichtet, wählen die Monographien der Reihe je unterschiedliche Schwerpunkte in ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit textuellen, performativen, visuellen, materiellen oder virtuellen Repräsentationsformen. Untersuchungsgegenstände der letzten Jahre waren beispielsweise die sprachlichen Varietäten des Englischen sowie Darstellungen und Inszenierungen von regionalen, (trans)nationalen und globalen Identitäten.

48 publications