Guest Editor’s Column

Under the title Narrative Hermeneutics, this special issue engages in a dialogue between two notions: narrative and human understanding—the latter often being examined under the heading of hermeneutics. Both narrative and hermeneutics stand for independent traditions of study rooted in various humanities, especially philosophy and literary and linguistic disciplines. Over the last few decades, both have attracted new attention by theorists and even scientists, as is reflected by novel multi- and transdisciplinary formations such as the narrative turn and the interpretive turn. It is thus surprising that the manifold links between these two traditions have not received more attention in Anglo-Saxon debates on literature, narrative, and philosophy. One reason might be that hermeneutical ideas for long have had a hard time, even if some of them might have already taken shape as part of the pragmatist program, as Rorty has argued (e.g., 1991).

Still, there is a striking contrast with Continental traditions, particularly with what Rorty has called the post-Nietzschean tradition of Franco-German thought. Here, philosophers of hermeneutics such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida, who have equally interrogated theoretical and literary texts to develop their arguments, have understood themselves as embedded in overarching intellectual continuities that reach back to Greek antiquity. They have essentially contributed to the formation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century hermeneutics as a conceptual tradition offering an alternative to structuralist, empiricist, and positivist (including, more recently, cognitivist, neuroscientific, and materialist) philosophies of science, language, and the mind. What gives this tradition its alternative charge is the particular attention given to humans’ capacities of interpretive understanding, intersubjectivity, and meaning-making.

The essays in this volume address a number of questions discussed in this tradition and connect them to present theorizing in narrative studies. Yet they have more in common than an interest in these two traditions and their intersections. There also is the assumption that interpretation and understanding is not only a philosophical concern but also a central dimension of narrative itself. Some even view the telling and understanding of stories as a hermeneutical operation sui generis, an interpretive act of meaning. On this view, hermeneutical operations are at the heart of every process of narrative understanding; in fact, narrative is interpretive meaning formation. This vision is complemented by a conception of interpretive understanding as a narrative process. One focus of this conception is on the understanding of complex temporal experiences—for example, of individual and historical changes. Mostly these scenarios include trouble. In fact, whenever we are to understand complex, troubled, and messy human affairs we conceive of them as something that happens in time; that is, we narrativize them. This argument is unfolded by Ricoeur in his magisterial study Time and Narrative (1984, 1985, 1988), in which he investigates the narrative fabric of basic forms of time experience. In doing so, Ricoeur has also pointed out in a more general sense how interpretive understanding is narratively organized once it has reached a certain level of intricacy. That this complexity is due to our unique historical and cultural being in the world is a point that has been made, perhaps, even more strongly in Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960/2004). Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is, besides Ricoeur’s, the second central point of reference for the papers in this issue.

To examine the narrative organization of processes of understanding is one of the central subjects of narrative hermeneutics. Yet the seven articles in this issue also demonstrate that there is a broad and variegated range of studies inspired by these ideas. Scholars from several disciplines with various research interests explore a number of (oral and written) types and genres of narrative. They not only expand the traditional scope of hermeneutical investigations, which was focused on the interpretation or exegesis of texts, toward a concept of text that, in the wake of Ricoeur, extends to more general structures of human action. They also reinterpret the very meaning of understanding and interpretation itself.

More than this, in his contribution to this collection, “Hermeneutics beyond the Species Boundary: Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives,” David Herman shows how telling and...