Victorian Interpretation

Notes

M Notes AN OVERVIEW 1. Henry Jones, Browning as Philosophical Thinker (New York: Macmillan, 1891), 275. 2. K. M. Newton, Interpreting the Text: A Critical Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Literary Interpretation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 1–2. 3. James Engell, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), xi. 4. For overviews of the hermeneutic tradition see Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Kurt Mueller-Vollmer ed., The Hermeneutics Reader (New York: Continuum: 1988); and Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969). 5. Although many historians of hermeneutics consider Schleiermacher to be the founder of modern universal hermeneutics, some argue that the origins of Romantic hermeneutics are in fact in Friedrich Schlegel’s early (though unpublished) work. See, for instance, Ernst Behler, “The New Hermeneutics and Comparative Literature,” Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum 10.2 (1983): 25–45; and René Wellek, History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). Schlegel was part of a literary circle in the 1790s that included Schleiermacher and Novalis. See Jack Forstman, A Romantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and Early German Romanticism (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977) for an account of this circle. Still others have argued that universalist hermeneutics in fact emerges during the Enlightenment, in the work of the eighteenth-century rationalist investigators of interpretation such as Meier and Chladenius, and that the emphasis on Schleiermacher’s work as constituting something entirely new in hermeneutic thought has caused these important thinkers to be overlooked. See, for instance, Peter Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Martha Woodmansee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 173 6. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinze Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula, MT: Scholar’s Press, 1977), 95. August Boeckh similarly claims: “The task of interpretation is to reach as close an approximation as possible by gradual step-by-step progression: it cannot hope to reach the limit.” Philip August Boeckh, “Theory of Hermeneutics,” in The Hermeneutics Reader, 138. 7. Schleiermacher was taken by his followers, particularly Dilthey, to be advocating an empathetic understanding of the author’s creative personality. There has been much debate about the extent of Schleiermacher’s psychologism. 8. Boeckh writes: “Aside from quality of training, not everyone can be equally good as an expositor; and above all an original talent belongs to interpretation. . . . Some naturally have penetration into understanding.” “Theory of Hermeneutics,” 139. 9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1990), xxi. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc abc . . . ,” in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 61. 11. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in Meaning and Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), 3. 12. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 5. 13. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 146. 14. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. W. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), xvii. 15. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 13. 16. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 107. 17. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugene Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 264. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), III 12. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 375. 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, part 1, trans. Helen Zimmern (New York: Gordon Press, 1974), 270. 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, in Human All Too Human, part 2, trans. Paul V. Cohn (New York: Gordon Press, 1974), 17. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), 52. 23. Henry Sidgwick, “The Historical Method,” Mind 11.42 (1886): 213. 24. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), 22. 25. W. H. Mallock, The New Republic: Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House (New...