Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavor to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us.
The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust’, which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance.
Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities.
Literature, Interpretation, and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study.
Arvustused
Davis is a renowned scholar of European and particularly French thought . . . One of the strengths of this work is found, as in many of Daviss critical meditations, in the close readings of philosophical encountersin this case between literature and interpretationand in his own interpretative engagements with postwar literature and film.
Defending the import of hermeneutics to literary studies as he set out to do in the books opening pages, Davis constructs a strong case for attending to interpretation in our practices of reading. . . . Literature and the humanities are important, not because they can incontrovertibly make us better people, as has been claimed, but because they help us to orient ourselves to texts, films, speeches, and Others with curiosity and openness, never knowing whatif anythingof value we may discover.
Avril Tynan, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Forays
Part I: Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trust
1. Does Literature Matter?
2. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the Hermeneutics of Trust: Ricoeur,
Gadamer, Camus
3. Derrida, Deconstruction and Radical Hermeneutics
Part II: Misreading/Overreading
4. Overreading: Intentions, Mistakes and Lies
5. Reading and Overreading: Camuss Whales
6. Reading Violence, Violent Reading: Levinas and Hermeneutics
Part III: Reading/Ethics
7. Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Platos Challenge
8. Trauma, Poststructuralism and Ethics
9. Ethics, Stories and Reading
10. Limits of Reading, Overreading and Ethical Reading: Albert Camuss La
Chute
Conclusion: Forays into Good Reading, Bad Reading, Misreading, Overreading
and the Hermeneutics of (Guarded) Trust
Colin Davis is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research is mainly in the field of twentieth-century literature, film and theory.
