Toward a Reinvigoration of Interpretation

HERME(NEW)TICS: TOWARD A REINVIGORATION OF INTERPRETATION A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for ^ the Degree 30 <20% Master of Arts In ■ ms English: literature by Tyler Andrew Heid San Francisco, California May 2016 Copyright by Tyler Andrew Heid 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Herme(new)tics: Toward a Reinvigoration of Interpretation by Tyler Andrew Heid, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University. Wai-Leung Kwok, l Ph.D.r>u U Associate Professor of English Literature Lehua Yim, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English Literature HERME(NEW)TICS: TOWARD A REINVIGORATION OF INTERPRETATION Tyler Andrew Heid San Francisco, California 2016 The Humanities are in crisis. Dwindling funds, shrinking enrollments, and a general air of irrelevance have taken a toll on the disciplines, none more so dian Literature. For centuries, hermeneuticists have stymied tliis slide, generating codified practice for literary interpretation akin to die replicable, verifiable and heavily funded hard sciences. In the early 1970s, Paul Ricoeurs seminal essay “The Model of die Text” marked a high point for literary mediodology’s practical interventions, demonstrating relevant praxis by which valid applicability of literary sciences might be acknowledged. Modem hermeneuticist Gayatri Spivak holds die contemporary helm of literary teaching, but die interim departure from Ricoeurian hermeneutics has forced literary study onto a course diat aligns more widi die stultifying religious practice of lectionary reading dian widi interpretation. Scenes of teaching, represented through literary simulacra, will help understand literature’s current condition, and demonstrate a hopeful reinvigoration of hermeneutic interpretation to answer its decline. I certify diat die Abstract is a correct representation of die content of this thesis. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to all those who supported me through this process, and who gave me a much needed push from time to time. To my partner, family, friends, colleagues, and professors, know that you have my gratitude and my acknowledgment Uiat I couldn’t have done it without you. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1....................................................................................................................................1 The Scene of Teaching ..........................................................................................1 Ricoeurian Hermeneutics and the Legitimacy of Interpretations..............................4 Spivak and D isgrace - The Privileged Intertext....................................................... 14 Interlude.................................................................................................................................. 46 Chapter 2................................................................................................................................. 48 Interpretation Off-Campus........................................................................................ 48 Circling Back (Hermeneutically)................................................................................66 Works Cited............................................................................................................................ 74 1 I T h e S c e n e o f T e a c h in g The problem with literary interpretation is that it does not occur in a vacuum. The context for the continued existence of literary interpretation is universally and persistendy die university - there, procedures are taught and practiced, colloquia are held to validate or undermine particular methods, and the next generation of teachers receives its training. The interpretive procedures we will explore in this text find iheir genesis and iheir application in those hallowed lecture halls. But die university is a place of intense competition, for students, faculty, and disciplines alike. In a material world where the means of existence come from a shrinking, central pool, it is up to disciplines to prove dieir worth - to justify their continued existence - which sadly equates to their profitability for die university. This real material problem pits apples against oranges, in many cases. Often, the “natural” or “hard sciences,” recently re-coined as STEM education1, receive die bulk of endowment to die detriment of the human sciences. Profitability is certainly a factor behind diis common vein in die university funding structure, especially at research institutions where die promise of licensing and patents presents a much greater return on investment dian a freshly minted literary dieory - but diere is more to it than just die money. 1 Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education. 2 Verifiability and concrete validation are the hallmarks of the STEM fields. The universal method of the natural sciences, the “Scientific Mediod,” is based upon die verification of particular guesses. Above all, though, the validation of scientific process comes through die independent replication of results, resulting in a ratification of the knowledge gained through its practice. Through diis replication a legitimacy of science is reached, “proof’ is achieved that is undeniable and by all accounts objective. This lack of proof, diis failure of scientific legitimacy, is and has been a persistent plague upon the humanities - literary interpretation in particular. Where scientific inquiry is universally and necessarily provable, literary understanding is “singular and unverifiable,” to borrow Gayatri Spivak’s succinct description (Spivak 23). It exists in a realm entirely apart; it is not a science based “on evidentiary ground,” but a knowledge proven only by its very practice, or as Spivak calls it, the “setting-to-work” (23). Enter hermeneutics. “Hermeneutics” unto itself is nearly indefinable -though it is first and foremost an interpretive mediodology. It’s also a philosophical mode. It’s also a way of understanding how language functions. It’s a way of understanding how meaning is made. It’s how we take arbitrary marks on a piece of paper and transform them into works of art. It’s one of the earliest attempts to model die cognitive-perceptual apparatus native to human beings. It’s a millennia long effort to interpret interpretation, in whatever form. But to return to diat primary concept, it is a methodology. In his paper “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Paul Ricoeur writes: “I 3 assume that the primary sense of the word ‘hermeneutics’ concerns the rules required for tlie interpretation of the written documents of our culture” (91). This methodological invocation of a set of “rules,” of a methodology for a replicable and verifiable procedure, harkens to that scientific method; and while there is surely a traceable origin for this human tendency to fetishize verifiability, emerging with the post-Enlightenment rationalism that is the cornerstone of modem Western epistemic mode, lived experience should tell us as much. In many ways, hermeneutics, since the emergence of scientific practice, has been an attempt to “raise” literary interpretation to a place of verifiability, equivalent, though not equal, to the scientific method. To that end, hermeneuticists and literary scholars have been trying and testing, implementing and rejecting, interpretive methodologies with varying degrees of rigor and specifity. In this work I place diree of those methodologies, three that have defined and characterized reading practices across literal millennia but are critical to understanding the modern state of literary practice, into conversation: Paul Ricoeur’s model of hermeneutic interpretative practice, the liturgical reading that comes out of the lectionary, which is used by a vast majority of Christian denominations worldwide, and Spivak’s intertextual deconstruction. For Spivak an attempt to throw off the yoke of scientific legitimacy altogether is paramount, but ultimately weakens the foothold that literary reading has to stand in academia. For the lectionary, legitimacy is maintained by the tight control of interpretive practices, cyclically providing and maintaining an “acceptable” reading that 4 exists outside the purview of validation - seemingly in opposition to the academic problem, but we will suss out their interrelatedness. Hermeneutics, though, specifically the attempt by Paul Ricouer to institute a codified version of literary interpretation dirough an understanding of human action, attempts to provide an answer to the very real problem of delivering replicable interpretation to a society that thirsts for verifiable results. R ic o e u r ia n H ermeneutics a n d t h e L e g it im a c y o f I nterpretations One of die great difficulties that faces literary study, due to the seeming impossibility of its “scientific” validation, is its perceived inapplicability outside of its context at the university. I’m sure many will confirm my experience, of being asked, upon describing oneself as a student of literature, if I plan to read poems for a living, or become a novelist. Apparendy, those are die two vocations available to one who elects to study literature. In “The Model of die Text,” Ricoeur works against this common misconception. Even die tide, “Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” begins this work of providing a new

Load more