Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl sought to develop new method that would

bring certainty to a disintegrating civilization.

Objects could be regarded by consciousness.

everything not immanent to consciousness must be excluded and
all realities must be treated as phenomena.

To grasp any phenomena is to grasp what is essential and
unchanging in it.

Asked about the conditions which made knowledge possible.

Kants philosophy: A trascendental inquiry, individual
consciousness= trascendental subject.
It claimed to lay bare the very structures of consciousness
itself and also the very phenomena.


A form of methodological idealism, exploring human
consciousness.

Leavis mimetic theory: poetic language embodying the very
stuff or reality itself.

Leavis and Husserl: what is intuittive is eidos and life.

It is an authoritharian theory (intuiton).

Phenomenology promised a science of subjectivity itself.

The subject was the source and origin of all meaning, it
brought the world to be

Phenomenological criticism: Aims at a wholly immanent
reading of the text, unaffected by the outside and also at
complete objectivity.

The text is reduced to the embodiment of the authors
consciousness, his mind is the unifying essence.
Language is more than the expression of meanings and
meaning pre-dates language.

Hermeneutics
Meaning is produced in language.

Recognition that meaning is historical led Martin Heidegger to
break with Husserls line of thought.

The world is not an object

Heidegger partially decentre the human subject from the
position of dominance( imaginary)


Understanding does not depend only on cognition but it is a
part of the very human existence.

Art as defamiliarization, through it, phenomenology is able to
manifest the truth.

Heidegger fails to overturn the static, eternal truths of Husserl
and the Western metaphysical tradition by historicizing it.


It provided one imaginary solution to the crisis of modern
history.

Heidegger describes his philosophical enterprise as a
hermeneutic of Being and the word Hermeneutic means the
science or art of interpretation.

questions of historical interpretation rather than on
transcendental consciousness.

Heideggers successor was Hans-George Gadamer (Truth
and Method)


What is the meaning of a literary text?

Meaning was a kind of ideal object, it could be expressed in
a number of different ways but still remain the same meaning.

E.D. Hirsch Jr :The meaning of a literary work is fixed: it is
identical with whatever mental object the author had in mind
or intended at the time of writing
System of typical expectations and probabilities and the
authors meaning.

Meanings are not as stable and determinate as Hirsch thinks,
even authorial ones.

All he can do is reconstruct the authors probable intention.
But he pays no attention to the ways in which such
reconstructing can only go on within his own historically
conditioned frames of meaning and perception Eagleton

Gadamer: The meaning of a literary work is never exhausted
by the intentions of its author; as the work passes from one
cultural or historical context to the another

All interpretation is situational

Creative prejudices are those which arise from the tradition
and bring us into contact with it

Tradition holds an authority

Hermeneutics sees history as a living dialogue between past,
present and future .

It refuses to recognize that discourse is always caught up with
a power which may be by no means benign
Reception Theory
Examines the readers role in literature- Active
process

Literary texts are processes of signification
materialized only in the practice of reading.

Many questions can arise from reading only the
first to sentences of a text
The reader makes implicit connections The text gives cues.

Wolfgang Iser: Codes or rules that govern the way in which
meaning is produced. One needs to know that the words
belong to a code of reference.

Most effective literary work is one which forces the reader into
a new critical awareness of his or her customary codes and
expectations.


Reading brings us into deeper self-consciousness, catalyzes a
more critical view of our own identities.

Roman Ingarden presumes that literary works form organic
wholes, and the point of the readers filling in their
indeterminancies is to complete this harmony

Jean Paul Sautre: Whom is it written for? Every work
encodes what Iser calls animplied reader (language)


Stanley Fish -Reading is a process of experiencing
what it does to you. This is also a matter of what we do
to the text, a question of interpretation

Institutions affect the readers responses.

Any set of data can be explained by more theories than
one. Culture affects interpretation

Phenomenology
Hermeneutics
Subjectivity and Objectivity
in a nutshell