Negative hermeneutics
pp. 192-202
in: K. M. Newton (ed), Twentieth-century literary theory, Berlin, Springer, 1988Abstract
In the earlier section on hermeneutics the main area of debate was between the tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey in which the hermeneutic enterprise was to enable texts written in the past to be understood in their own terms by a later age and the Heidegger influenced method of H-G. Gadamer in which the interests of the present-day interpreter and the text as the product of the past are kept in balance. Some more recent theorists have, however, gone much further than Gadamer and have argued that hermeneutics should not only reject the view that the purpose of hermeneutics is to restore a text's past meaning in its own terms but should use modern concepts to question and undermine that meaning.
