scholarly journals Hermeneutics and its New Tendencies: to the Question of Aesthetic Paradigm Change

Discourse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
N. F. Shcherbak

Introduction. The work examines the main vector of development of contemporary literary and hermeneutics studies. The main aim is to show how the view of the text has changed and what are the important tools in the process of its interpretation.Methodology and sources. Firstly, various philosophical and literary approaches to texts are considered. One of the main ideas behind the research method is the comparison of the modernist, post-modernist and meta-modernist paradigm in the process of text interpretation. Another important aspect is the consideration of symptomatic and surface reading, as an important tool in the discussion of whether the text bears any meaning apart from the directly deducable and what is the most contemporary if not the best way of interpreting it. Most texts analyzed are literary examples, mainly taken from Anglophone literature.Results and discussion. The results of the research state a number of tendencies in the view of contemporary hermeneutics. Among the general conclusion of the shift from modernist to post-modern and meta-modern patterns in the narrative. Regarding the process of text interpretation what is stated is a general tendency to see the surface l evel of the text as bearing all the necessary and important meanings. The older and more conservative approach of bringing meaning into the text is also at work, depending on the traditions. Elimination of text interpretation (or denying it its original im portance) is also an important point of view, as it states that a literary text explains more than any supporting attempt of its explanation. Another important feature is a tendency of a modern literary text to adopt characteristics of poetry. The psychoanalytic view is competing with post-modernist or meta-modernist view.Conclusion. Metamodernist tendency, surface reading and attention to the literary text itself, and not its further explanation seems to be the core of a contemporary view of literary texts, their interpretation and, hense, meaning.

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-273
Author(s):  
Eckhard Lobsien

Abstract What sort of object is a literary text? From a phenomenological point of view - phenomenology considered as both a radical theory of reading and a theory of radical reading - a range of answers arise, many of them tinged with deconstructive momentum. This paper aims at pointing out some basic issues in reading literary texts, offering ten theses on the enduring tasks of phenomenological literary theory.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119
Author(s):  
Dennis Sobolev

IT IS WELL KNOWN that both traditional, historically orientated, literary criticism and new-critical studies were inseparable from a belief in the “unity” of meaning – a belief in the existence, below the multicolored surface of the literary text, of a single semantic center, which unifies the text and turns it into an “organic whole.” Similarly, Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists, though critical of the notion of the “organic whole” and its use in art criticism by the Neo-Romantics and the Symbolists, never questioned the alleged semantic unity of the literary text. An alternative approach to the problem of meaning was developed in the early books of Michel Foucault and conceptualized in his Archeology of Knowledge; he described meaning as “dispersal” and “dissemination.” A little later, in Dissemination and On Grammatology, Jacques Derrida radicalized Foucault's position by questioning the existence of clear-cut boundaries for Foucault's semantic “dissemination,” and he applied this notion in both philosophy and literary criticism. The resultant polemics between the two major approaches to the problem of the organization of meaning in the literary text caused the extreme polarization of literary studies; moreover, this polemics was often based on the tacit assumption that there exist only these two possibilities of the formal description of such organization: it should be described as either “unity” or “dissemination.” At the same time, from the logical, a priori, point of view, these terms describe only the poles of possible organization of meaning; moreover, practical criticism tends to show that both pure “unity” of meaning and its pure “dissemination” are very rarely found in literary texts. Thus, it seems to me, that those scholars who work in the field of literary criticism and cultural theory should attempt to create more complex and more precise models of the organization of meaning, which will transcend the dichotomy of “unity” and “dissemination.” One of these such models, the model of “semantic counterpoint,” is described and exemplified in this paper.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-280
Author(s):  
Arne Merilai

A. H. Tammsaare was drawn to the musical tonality of prose. Importantly though, he did not wholeheartedly embrace sound patterning as a mode of writing. Rather, he preferred a semantic widening of ordinary language within a comprehensively holistic “spherical music”. In his novels, we can detect a deliberate use of rhythmic motion in sentences. This is evident primarily in the wealth of lexical and syntactic repetitions resulting in a parallelism of patterns. An obvious, although discreet, rhythmic design emerges in the thesisantithesis- synthesis parataxis the core words of which are the adversative and coordinating conjunctions aga (‘but’), and integrative ometi (‘yet’, ‘indeed’). The frequency with which these bound conjunctions occur in Tammsaare’s work surpasses that of ordinary speech by about four times, and it is twice as high as the statistical mean for literary texts. One might call this expressive of an epic but-mantra, a prose-poetic but-meter, or a narrative polysyndeton, and, from a philosophical point of view, a but-dialectic. Whenever a reader fails to appreciate Tammsaare’s underlying tone and does not discern the emotional flow of longing scepticism that issues from his dyadic-triadic chains, this pervasive, yet inconspicuously arguing, textual mode may seem unduly pretentious. Indeed, there is nothing to prevent a prose text from featuring a poetic style that is rooted in a poetry-like, paradigmatic parallelism as the poetic principle of formal and semantic equivalence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Hong Zhang

From a rhetorical point of view, reading is not an isolated process of absorbing the meaning of words in a text but a creative activity in which the reader constructs meaning through the symbolic exchange with the text in a particular situation. This study elaborates on the rhetorical features of literary texts through the lens of rhetorical situation, rhetorical purpose, and Aristotle’s three means of persuasion. It then illustrates how to approach a literary text rhetorically through the interpretation of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, shedding light on the development of critical reading in literary instruction. The study displays the literary text’s rhetoricity and demonstrates that the rhetorical approach enables the readers to explore the persuasive mechanism of a literary text, examine the sources the writer marshals to adapt to the audience and make their judgments based on the ethical, emotional, and logical proofs. Furthermore, the rhetorical approach to literary reading provides theoretical ground for a rhetorical mode of literary instruction, which directs our focus on the readers’ constructive role and creates more space for individual interpretation. In this way, a rhetorical approach to literary reading plays a significant role in developing student readers’ creativity, critical thinking, and rhetorical awareness both in reading and writing.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ-tls for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Samar Zahrawi

This article focusses on the translator’s task as a cultural mediator who has to transfer the nuances of the literary text faithfully. The translation of culture-specific items, such as proverbs, figurative language, reference to religion, mythology or literature, and stylistics, are at the core of the discussion. This paper discusses generally recommended strategies used in translating culture specific items (CSIs), and further analyses and evaluates such strategies as used in two translated Arabic plays; Sa’dallah Wannous’s The Glass Café (1978/2004) and Mamdouh ‘Udwan’s Reflections of a Garbage Collector (1987/2006). The translation strategies used in these two plays are recognized and rationalized in terms of giving a domesticated or a foreignized effect. Besides transferring meaning, the cultural identity of the text is highlighted as a mainstay of the translation process


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (43) ◽  
pp. 102-117
Author(s):  
Ali Abdulilah Gheni ◽  

Stylistics is the analysis of the language of literary texts integrated within various approaches to create a framework of different devices that describe and distinct a particular work. Therefore, feminist stylistics relied on theories of feminist criticism tries to present a counter- image of a woman both in language use and society, to draw attention , raise awareness and change ways that gender represents. Feminist stylistic analysis is related not only to describe sexism in a text, but also to analyze the way that point of view, agency, metaphor, and transitivity choices are unanticipatedly and carefully connected to issues of gender(Mills,1995:1) The study tries to discuss matters of gender representation in stylistic analysis and how questions and messages of gender are deducted and exposed when reading and interpreting a text. Moreover, the concept of transitivity and how meaning is encoded and adopted by different patterns of transitivity will be analyzed and investigated. The study has shown that transitivity patterns are used as a device to analyze gender representation as well as to describe the ideational meaning which involves the experiential realization of the world. The results of the analysis of transitivity choices of the selected romantic scene have shown that the whole number of processes are nineteen, the female does five processes in her role as an actor, whereas male shows fourteen which are the highest number in his performance. The male appears to be the active participant agent who is conscious and in control of his action, whereas the female appears to be passive in her quality, volition and being affected or recipient actor. Also, it is seen that feminist analysis tries to create a new message and picture of woman position; this is depicted by the essential role of the readers' assumption and contextual factors of the text in the process of interpretation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 34-54
Author(s):  
I.D. Volkova ◽  

The purpose of the present article is to describe the significance of translator's notes from the point of view of localization of English works of fiction for Russian readership, as well as to identify the types of lexical units that become object of adaptation and the degree of their explication. The theoretical and methodological basis of this study is made up of the key provisions of translation studies, the study of linguistic localization and the study of literary discourse. Within the framework of the present research, a comparative analysis of the concepts of adaptation (pragmatic adaptation) and localization has been carried out to substantiate the advisability of using a new term to name culturally determined modifications of the original text. The characteristics of a literary text have been established, which make it possible to classify works of fiction as objects of localization. Content analysis of the English and Russian versions of the novels Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Slade House by the British writer D. Mitchell has been carried out. The original English-language and translated Russian-language versions of the specified literary works are analyzed, in particular, a comparative analysis of the English-language lexical units and phrases, accompanied by translator's notes in the secondary texts, has been conducted. The advantages of notes as a form of localization of literary texts are indicated. They consist in the possibility of a more detailed and quick description of foreign cultural units in comparison with intra-text transformations.


Author(s):  
Olha Shum

The article examines peculiarities of the translation analysis of the literary text, in particular the pre-translation stage and translation itself on the example of the political and satirical novel “Oleniada” by I. Rozdobudko. Each researcher has their own point of view on the structure and stages of the translation process. The translation of any text is a long process, which consists of different stages depending on the purpose of the final product. Obtaining a quality adequate translation in the target language requires the translator to take a number of steps to study the author’s work, his or her individual features, genre, if it’s necessary to be an expert on the issues described in the original text – history, medicine, culture, geography, criminology, etc. The vast majority of scholars in the field of translation studies do not distinguish between pre-translation and translation analyzes of text, considering them to be inseparable from each other. Pre-translation analysis of a literary text has its own laws, according to which the dominant features of the work are studied (anthropocentrism, aesthetic information, fiction, imagery, etc.). We define the relevance and prospects of further research on this topic in the comparison of pre-translation analyzes of literary texts by different authors and different genres.


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 01006
Author(s):  
Tatiana V. Akasheva ◽  
Nuria M. Rakhimova ◽  
Tatiana V. Emets

The paper is devoted to the issue of nonverbal explication of emotions in literary texts of a flash fiction. Nonverbal means of communication are studied in several directions. There are works reflecting this problem from the perspective of semiotics, linguistics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. A number of scientists is engaged in lexical description of paralinguisms. The study of linguostylistic problems of paralinguisms in literary works presents a special interest. The appeal to this problem is explained by the fact that adequate interpretation of a literary text is impossible without the corresponding reader’s understanding of nonverbal means of emotional expression since this requires nontrivial intellectual operations and a certain breadth of knowledge. The study is based on the analysis of three short stories by a famous German writer Thomas Mann: Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898), Tobias Mindernickel (1898) and Tristan (1902). The rationale of the study is caused by the immaturity of this subject in German. The novelty is defined by the study of paralinguistic units in literary texts of T. Mann. The purpose of the paper is to describe nonverbal means and to define their functional yield in a literary text. To achieve this purpose, the paper deals with continuous sampling methods, contextual analysis and interpretation. The study showed that Thomas Mann uses paralinguisms to describe the main characters generally applying characterizing, evaluation, text-forming and forecast functions. Paralinguisms ensure text cohesion, integrity of its perception and are always aimed to implement the author’s plan and create the fictitious world of a literary work and consequently, contribute to the expression of an idea and a subject. The materials of the given paper may be used in theoretical courses of German lexicology, stylistics and in practical classes on literary text interpretation.


Author(s):  
A. Bellandi ◽  
A. Bellusci ◽  
A. Cappelli ◽  
E. Giovannetti

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