CCR 691 Palmer Notes

Wild, John, ed. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. 3-71.

“Chapter 1: Introduction”

What is hermenuetics? There is no coherent definition, even though several fields (theology, literary criticism, etc.) are using it. Therefore, this book attempts to clarify the meaning and the scope of the term hermenuetics, taking into account its slipperary nature and providing bibliographic references for future study. Another purpose of the book is to “delineate the matrix of considerations within which American literary theorists can meaningfully repone the question of interpretation [literary] on a philosophical level prior to all considerations of application in techniques of literary analysis” (5). Modern literary interpretation is scientific in approach: it sees the text out of context and objectively, without a sense of history, a complete separation between the text and the reader, strict analysis. Texts are to be dissected. This is wrong, the author contends. Texts are human and cannot be understood completely with a cold, scientific analysis – texts speak, and we need a “humanistic understanding of what interpretation of a work involves” (7). Truly understanding the full nature of text means risking one’s own sense of reality. There is a difference between a work (made by humans) and an object (not necessarily made by humans); there needs to be a new literary theory that allows scholars to interpret works, not just analyze objects. This requires a historical and humanistic lens. A full theory of hermeneutics involves a broader vision of interpretation – it’s not just about the text, but about human thinking and understanding. It also is not limited to language, but includes interpretation of all art and all of the humanities – all works of men – and could be seen as a theoretical foundation for all of the humanities disciplines.

Quotable Quotes

In American literary interpretation, “we have forgotten that the literary work is not a manipulatble object completely at our disposal; it is a human voice out of the past, a voice which must somehow be brought to life. Dialogue, not dissection, opens up the world of a literary work” (7).

“Hermenuetics is the study of understanding, especially the taks of understanding texts. Natural science has methods of understanding natural objects; “works” require a hermeneutic, a ’science’ of understanding appropriate to works as works” (8).

Hermeneustics “tries to hold together two areas of understanding theory: the question of what is involved in the event of understanding a text, and the question of what understading itself is in its most foundational and ‘existential’ sense” (10). Hermeneutics sees the understanding and interpretation of a text to go way beyond the text itself; a text is a window on what it means to be human, and therefore an interpretation of it (not strict analysis) must take into account a larger historical understanding and new theories for grasping that understanding.

Notable Notes

Hermeneutics seems like a useful lens for evaluating student work – you can’t just analyze it as an object (even though sometimes, with the scope and purpose of studies, that is sufficient) but you must understand the entire situation that surrounds the text – the circumstances of time, place, writer, reader, etc. It’s a lot more work but it strives to understand the text more authentically and fully.

“Chapter 2: Hermeneuein and Hermeneia: The Modern Significance of Their Ancient Usage.”

The root of the word hermeneutics comes from the Greek “to interpret” and “interpretation,” with ties to the Greek god Hermes, the messenger god, whose duty was to translate what was unknown to humans into what would be intelligible for human beings. He is credited with the discovery of langauge and writing, what humans use to understand the world. There are three basic directions of meaning for the ancient Greek words: to say (express out loud with words); to explain (a situation); and to translate (into another language) – all mean in English to interpret, but in different senses. In all, something unknown is “brought to understanding;” in both literary analysis and theology (who use hermeneutics for interpretation), then, it is making something distant seem near and have significance. The author makes the point that even silent reading is oral interpretation (to say) and that the oral makes the written complete (17). Christianity was about the spoken, not the written, Word, meant to be proclaimed out loud. Hermeneutical theory tries to recapture the full meaning of spoken, oral, and lived language that is held captive in text.

Quotable Quotes

“Rapid, silent reading is a phenomenon brought on by printing” (19).

The Bible: “It is a message, a ‘proclamation,’ and is meant to be read aloud, and meant to be heard. It is not a set of scientific principles; it is a reality of a different order from that of scientific truth. It is a reality which is to be understood as an historical story, a happening to be heard. A principle is scientific; a happening is historical. The rationality of a principle is not that of an event. In this deeper sense of the word ‘historical,’ literature and theology are disciplines more strictly ‘historical’ than ’scientiric.’ The interpretational processes appropriate to science are different from the intepretational processes appropriate to historical happenings, or to the happenings theology or literature tries to understand” (19).

“Language, as it emerges from nonbeing, is not signs but sound. It loses some of its expressive power (and therefore its meaning) when it is reduced to visual images – the silent world of space. Therefore theology and literary interpretation must retransform writing into speech. The principles of understanding which enable this transformation constitute a major concern of modern hermeneutical theory” (20).

“Meaning is a matter of context; the explanatory procedure provides the arena for understanding. Only within a specific context is an event meaningful” (24).

“Explanation is grounded in preunderstanding, so that prior to any meaningful explanation, [the interpreter/performer] must enter the horizon of the subject and situation. He must in his own understanding grasp and be grasped by the text. His stance in this encounter, the preunderstanding of the material and situation which he must bring to it, the whole proble, in other words, of the merging of his horizon of understanding with the horizon of understanding which comes to meet him in the text – this is the dynamic complexity of interpretation. It is the ‘hermeneutical problem’” (26).

Notable Notes

Hermeneutics is concerned with making meaning – with connecting what the text offers to the reader and the world today. It is about establishing and understanding significance in the most full, human way. This knowledge and understanding cannot be grasped through strict objective scientific analysis; rather, there must be new theories and modern ways of saying, explaining, and translating.

“Chapter 3: Six Modern Definitions of Hermeneutics”

 Hermeneutics has been taken up in six different ways, highlighting six different kinds of interpretation: 1. biblical 2. philological 3. scientific 4. geistewissenschaftliche 5. existential 6. cultural. The earliest form was the principles of biblical interpreation from the 17th century. To understand human beings and interpret their actions and words, you need historical, not scientific, understanding.

Geistewissenschaften – all disciplines focused on understanding man’s art, actions, and writings (41).

“Chapter 4: The Contemporary Battle over Hermeneutics: Betti versus Gadamer”

There are two camps of understanding hermeneutics: either it is a collection of principles (a method) used for interpretation of texts or it is a “philosophical exploration of the character and requisite conditions for all understanding” (46). The first proposes that a text can be interpreted on its own and the interpreter must try to understand the text in its own historical situation; the latter acknowledges that all understanding is historical and connected to the present, but is prone to relativism and questions historical knowledge itself.

The debate is: “One the one side are the defenders of objectivity and validation, who look to hermeneutics as the theoretical source for nroms of validation; on the other side are the phenomenologicsts of the event of understanding, who stress the historical character of this ‘event,’ and consequently the limitations of all claims to objective knowledge’ and ‘objective validity” (65).

“Chapter 5: The Meaning and Scope of Hermeneutics”

All the disagreements over the purpose and meaning of hermeneutics (with questions of what can be known, the role of the author, etc.) are not harmful to hermeneutics; one theory does not invalidate the other – they are all ways of interpretation. It asks what understanding is. The focus of the study of hermeneutics is a dual one: it involves both what it means to understand and what it means to interpret and understand a particular text. Many disciplines  – both those that explicitly deal with langauge and those that don’t – can benefit from a hermeneutical investigation.

The Chief

I’ve jumped on the bandwagon as well. I took the personality quiz at My personality.info and it came out that I was ENTJ, or “The Chief.” Pretty necessary personality with one more on the way…

CCR 735 Notes 8/28

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. Acts, Texts, and the Teaching Context: Their Relations within a Dramatistic Philosophy of Composition. Dissertation. Case Western Reserve University. January 1980.

Phelps traces the history of composition in the 19th and 20th centuries, citing that until the 1960s, composition was a field and a community of teachers who shared pedagogical knowledge about the first-year composition course. When, in the 1960s, composition began to assert itself as a true discipline, scholars realized that the field could not be based on practice and product-centered scholarship alone: process, the study of the act of writing, was essential for building theory. Phelps question is whether or not process is a large and fruitful enough topic to build an entire field around or is it just one question that will point the field into larger and more comprehensive areas of inquiry, such as around the concept of act. She then analyzes how process is taken up in the composition community – what it means, how it is applied, and its strengths and weaknesses for being a point to center a discipline around. Phelps sees three implications for the focus on process for composition: an emphasis on studying human performance rather than objects or rules, a recognition of historicity and how things change over time, and an emphasis on empirical methodologies. To Phelps, the centrality of process in composition points to a diachronic position in the field, a paradigm shift from the mostly synchronic investigation in linguistics in the 20th century. She also notes a change in the relationship between theory and experience – with process, experience can create theory, not just prove it, so practical knowledge is valuable to the theoretical identity of the field. Phelps argues that the term process is too limiting, that changing composition’s focus from process to act will open up opportunities in research and inquiry that would not be considered if the field solely concentrated on the writing process, as defined by Emig and other early scholars.

Quotable Quotes

“My question is this: is process a powerful and comprehensive enough concept to organize a whole universe of discourse for composition, within which we can develop coherent knowledge about a well-defined subject matter? Or is it rather a limited concept with the crucial historical function of pointing us toward a broader, deeper, more fertile and complex notion, that of act?” (9)

“Any key term is highly suggestive. In addition to its defining features, it implies a host of other ideas, attitudes, approaches, and so on, and through these it links up with other networks of ideas on many level. To make judgments about the usefulness of a term, we must pursue as many of these implications as we can. At the same time we need to consider how the term is actually being applied in a historical context, and how that application limits or opens up further possibilities” (14).

Notable Notes

synchronic – taking an object of study out of time; understanding it in suspension outside of the real world (what linguistics was doing in the most of the 20th century)

diachronic – studying that object within the flow of time and understanding how it evolves and changes and grows (what linguistics was doing in most of the 19th century) More interested in performance.

Good overview of argument at end of page 14.

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. “The Dream of Pattern Language: Revisiting the Choice between Structure and Context.” 5 October 2000.

Phelps applies architect and designer Christopher Alexander’s pattern language for design to writing studies, specifically citing Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. Her points include: 1. that patterns can generate words, but not meanings; 2. patterns are determined in dynamic use, not a closed act; 3. the design act necessarily entails experimentation outside the pattern; 4. the social and political (and other) context can cause patterns to fail in one situation and succeed in another. Phelps described Alexander’s realization that no pattern language can take in the complexities of context as a shock, and likened his shock to the shock the field of composition experienced in the late 1980s when it took its political and social “turns.”
Phelps describes this shock – the realization of the slippery nature and pervasive effect of context – as the choice between structure and context for composition scholars. She argues that the field chose to create a binary between the two and sided with context, erasing form as an area of serious study and thus crippling the field’s ability to understand it.

Quotable Quotes

The dream of Alexander’s pattern language: “is that the answer to this problem [finding new forms to fit new contexts] can be found in formal structures or rules that contain in themselves the possibility of good design independent of, or prior to, their use.”

“From my perspective, the grounding of discursive meaning in context did not erase the possibility of symbolic structure, but posed even more urgently an absolutely fundamental issue: how are we to understand the relationship between the order of form, as represented in textual and other symbolic expressions, and the order of life – the material environment, the social semiotic context, and human activity?”

There is a “need to analyze closely the processes by which form codes situations heterogeneously in both print and online environments, and to reap the rewards taht may come of making more sophisticated comparisons between them.”

“We cannot ever forget or give up the dream of the pattern language entirely, because at its deepest it represents the heuristic power and generative functions of form, the mediating capacity of text to shape people and their environments and be shaped by them.”

Notable Notes

Pattern language – develop a system and a productive theory whereby you can create design/rhetorical solutions through applying tested patterns in new environments.

CCR 691 8/27 Reading

Barton, Ellen. “More Methodological Matters: Against Negative Argumentation.” CCC. 51:3 (Feb. 2000) 399-416.

 The author in this article argues against using negative argumentation to justify their research methodologies because she claims that it threatens to limit the scope of methodological education and research in the field. She explains that during the 1990s, the field saw an explosion in the discussion of ethics extending into ethical research methodologies, which was loosely defined as both giving back to the community and having the researcher and participant engage collaboratively and reflexively in the research study. This new ethical model was often promoted as being the alternative to “traditional” and “hegemonic” research methodologies, and this repeated negative argumentation to defend ethical models against other research strategies has led, the author contends, to an unnecessary and potentially scholarly stifiling abandonment of other methodologies. The author argues that the collaborative models work well for ethnographies and small-scale case studies but not well for large case studies or empirical studies.  The devaluing of empirical studies, the author claims, allows the field to ignore the ethics inherent in empirical research frameworks, takes away the field’s ability to ask certain questions about language and language production in other contexts, and limits the methodological choices offered to new scholars who might need empirical frameworks to answer their new research questions.

Quotable Quotes

 ”Research outside this particular ethical creed is criticized as research that silences its subjects in favor of its academic, disciplinary, and methodological tyranny” (402).

“In turning away from research products in order to foreground processes, in turning away from more distanced relationships to insist upon more intimate ones, the field risks losing other kinds of research designs and analyses” (404).

“Ethical does not always mean personal; ethical can mean distanced as well” (405).

Some questions cannot be formed collaboratively with research participants – researchers draw on a larger body of specialized knowledge. “Such questions are not unethical” (406).

The author’s argument has been to develop “an enhanced understanding of the ethics of all methodological frameworks in composition established by means of positive, not negative, argumentation. Composition is in a unique position to practice and display such methodological and ethical diversity for the entire university” (409).

Composition is able to use an entire range of methodologies, “from empirical investigation to humanistic inquiry” (410).

Notable Notes

Last full-scale empirical study of student writing was the Connors/Lunsford Ma and Pa Kettle study published in 1989. Time for a new one? I just read that article a few days ago and remarked how one of their claims was that visible student grammatical errors like it’s/its confusion might be attributed to the growing reliance of students on other forms of media besides print, but I wonder how the age of the internet has affected that – I believe students now do read more because of the web. An interesting study, wouldn’t it be?

 I think Barton is dead on in her argument. Although closely collaborative research is important, it’s true that people who practice it sometimes revert to basking in the ethical feel-goodedness that it gives them. Casting one research methodology as more ethical and good than another is limiting and misleading – what is important is the results of the research, and as long as the researcher proceeds in his study with good intentions and a solid understanding of what he is doing, his methodology shouldn’t matter as long as it is sound.