Abstract
‘Hermeneutics’, or the art of interpretation, today more precisely the theory of interpretative methods in the humanities and social sciences, has emerged as one of the most stimulating and productive of several new directions in recent criticism. It is hardly a complete newcomer: traditionally associated with techniques of exegesis or explanation of individual passages of the Bible and the classics, it has since the late eighteenth century been increasingly applied to a wide range of texts. One of the steps in this direction was the perception that the Bible was not a uniquely inspired or revealed text, but itself literary in character; thus techniques for explicating the Bible became fully available for explicating literary texts generally, and these techniques in turn underwent a sea-change as what we would now call ‘literary criticism’ began to be formulated and practised.
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Further Reading
Introductions to hermeneutics of literature
Eagleton, Terry, ‘Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory’, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford, 1983 ) pp. 54–90.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn., 1967 ). Hoy, David Couzens, The Critical Circle: Literature and History in Contemporary Hermeneutics ( Berkeley, Calif., 1978 ).
Palmer, Richard, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer ( Evanston, Ill., 1969 ).
Hermeneutic Critics
Dilthey, Wilhelm, ‘The Development of Hermeneutics’, Selected Writings (Cambridge, 1976) pp. 246–63.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, ed. Garret Barden and Gohr Cummings (New York, 1975 ).
Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Age of the World View’, trs. Marjorie Grene, in Boundary, 4, no. 2 (1976).
Ricoeur, Paul, ‘What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding’ and in ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trs. and ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1981) pp. 145–64, 197–221.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, ‘On Translation’, in German Romantic Criticism (Oxford, 1982) pp. 1–25.
Hermeneutics of Drama
Lukacs, Georg, ‘Historical Novel and Historical Drama’, The Historical Novel, trs. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell ( Harmondsworth, Middx, 1969 ).
Palmer, Richard, ‘Towards a Postmodern Hermeneutics of Performance’, in Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello (eds), Performance in Postmodern Culture ( Madison, Wis., 1977 ).
Peck, Jeffrey M. (compiler), ‘Bibliography of Hermeneutics: Literary and Biblical Interpretation’, in E. S. Shaffer (ed.), Comparative Criticism, y (Cambridge, 1983 ).
Plessnor, Helmuth, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior ( Evanston, Ill., 1970 ).
Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors ( Ithaca, NY, 1974 ).
Turner, Victor, From Ritual to Theatre (New York, 1982 ).
Turner, Victor, ‘Universals of Performance’ (1982), in E. S. Shaffer (ed.), Comparative Criticism, viii (Cambridge, 1986 ).
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© 1993 Elinor Shaffer
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Shaffer, E. (1993). The Hermeneutic Approach to Theatre and Drama. In: Hilton, J. (eds) New Directions in Theatre. New Directions in Theatre. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22750-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22750-1_6
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