Abstract
This chapter should be understood as the complement to the previous one. There we considered various aspects of writing. Here we are going to discuss the dimensions of reading and the implications of reading for our human self-understanding. As in Chapter 4, our discussion of reading will require a few conceptual and technical clarifications. Reading is an interpretative activity. In terms of its clarification I would like to define all acts of reading as interpretative acts, though there are obviously interpretative acts other than reading, for instance the reception of pictorial works of art. But on the basis of this clarification I shall use ‘reading’ and ‘text-interpretation’ synonymously.
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Notes
E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), 46.
Cf. E. D. Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 17–35 and 88–92.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 52.
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
For instance John Sturrock, Structuralism (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1986).
See also John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds, The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.
For further information on Post-structuralism see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982)
Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983), esp. 156–210
Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Jaques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 280.
Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 278–93.
Mark C. Taylor, ‘Deconstruction: What’s the Difference?’, Soundings 66 (1983), 400.
Cf. also Stephen D. Moore’s excellent analysis of Derrida’s programme of deconstruction in Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 131ff. (Moore provides also an extensive bibliography on the post-structuralist movement.)
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 489.
Cf. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 60f.
Michel Foucault, Von der Subversion des Wissens, ed. and trans. Walter Seitter (Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1978), 13.
See also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988)
Hans Kling, Infallible? An Enquiry, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Collins, 1971).
A comprehensive documentation of the ‘case’ of Hans Küng is now available: Leonard Swidler, ed., Kling in Conflict (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981).
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. 2nd edn (London: Heinemann, 1978)
Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981).
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 76–100, here 89.
Cf. Anne Carr, Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 101:
Cf. Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 190ff.
Klaus Berger, Hermeneutik des Neuen Testaments (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1988), 25.
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© 1991 Werner G. Jeanrond
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Jeanrond, W.G. (1991). The Transformative Power of Reading. In: Theological Hermeneutics. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09597-1_5
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