Hermeneutics, a critical approach, is concerned with understanding of meaning of texts. It was first employed in interpreting The Old Testament and TheBible and law. This study deals with three issues: concept of hermeneutics, Husserl's and Heidegger's philosophical influences on hermeneutics, and the applicability of hermeneutics in Joyce's Finn's Hotel analysis. It is prefaced by explaining the essential concepts of hermeneutics, such as, prejudice, historical horizon, historical consciousness, and general consensus. Then, it tackles critics' opinions on Finn's Hotel within Joyce's fictive texts. Its important result is that the hermeneutic approach cannot be fully applied on Finn's Hotel analysis for it cannot situate it independently within
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This theory of interpretation was first applied to the study of the
Holy Scriptures and of law, but its applications were then largely extended to encompass a wide range of the different fields of the human intellectual enquiry such as philosophy and literary theory.
The term "hermeneutics" owes its existence to the Greek word
"hermeneuo" which means "interpret" or "translate". This Greek word may have been derived from the name of the Messenger god "Hermes".
Hermes was the mediator between the gods and men. He was a multifaceted character: the inventor of language and speech, an interpreter, a liar, a patron of thieves, and a trickster. These multiple roles and different sides to his composite entity befitted him to be a representative figure for hermeneutics. We can readily draw the parallel between his several capacities and the inexhaustible potentialities of meaning that a work of art or any other written text could afford.
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The beginning of modern hermeneutics was initiated by the
German thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768- 1834). Schleiermacher concludes that the meaning of a text does not reside only in …show more content…
(born 1928) argued that meaning is a private property of the authors themselves and should not be appropriated by any critic or reader. Texts are not written to be shared among the public but should still uphold the rightful claims of their authors even long after their death. The position that Hirsch takes does not prevent him from conceding that the text itself does not provide guiding norms that help constrain us in our attempt to construe its meaning in accordance with the meaning the author had in mind when writing this text. He admits that there may be different valid interpretations for one and the same text that could mean different things to different people at different times. Nevertheless, he still insists that the meaning of a work is identical with what the author meant by it at the
4
time of writing, arguing that these different readings of the salve text are a matter of the work's "significance" rather than its "meaning". The reader's ability to make sense of a text outside its original realm is
This theory of interpretation was first applied to the study of the
Holy Scriptures and of law, but its applications were then largely extended to encompass a wide range of the different fields of the human intellectual enquiry such as philosophy and literary theory.
The term "hermeneutics" owes its existence to the Greek word
"hermeneuo" which means "interpret" or "translate". This Greek word may have been derived from the name of the Messenger god "Hermes".
Hermes was the mediator between the gods and men. He was a multifaceted character: the inventor of language and speech, an interpreter, a liar, a patron of thieves, and a trickster. These multiple roles and different sides to his composite entity befitted him to be a representative figure for hermeneutics. We can readily draw the parallel between his several capacities and the inexhaustible potentialities of meaning that a work of art or any other written text could afford.
3
The beginning of modern hermeneutics was initiated by the
German thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768- 1834). Schleiermacher concludes that the meaning of a text does not reside only in …show more content…
(born 1928) argued that meaning is a private property of the authors themselves and should not be appropriated by any critic or reader. Texts are not written to be shared among the public but should still uphold the rightful claims of their authors even long after their death. The position that Hirsch takes does not prevent him from conceding that the text itself does not provide guiding norms that help constrain us in our attempt to construe its meaning in accordance with the meaning the author had in mind when writing this text. He admits that there may be different valid interpretations for one and the same text that could mean different things to different people at different times. Nevertheless, he still insists that the meaning of a work is identical with what the author meant by it at the
4
time of writing, arguing that these different readings of the salve text are a matter of the work's "significance" rather than its "meaning". The reader's ability to make sense of a text outside its original realm is