The Dialectic of Questionability: Towards a Hermeneutic Praxis of Reading Literature

Abstract

The present paper is an attempt towards applied hermeneutics, seeking to experiment with a hermeneutic praxis of reading that runs counter the prevalent approaches to literary interpretation. Instead of engaging oneself in a pointless exercise of deciphering the meaning of a certain literary work, often based on formal and thematic analysis, the study takes as its focal point the Gadamerian view of reading and interpretation as not a mere process of extracting meaning by means of an interpreter who mostly deals with the text as an object of investigation, but rather as an ever-ending act of dialogue set on equal footing with both the reader and the text—being co-subjects or partners in dialogue. This hermeneutic approach to literary interpretation essentially entails that any act of reading and interpretation presupposes the dialectic of question and answer that goes beyond thematic analysis to a much broader perspective wherein a literary text is allowed to draw the reader into a hermeneutic circle of understanding, especially by the answers it opens up and, by the same token, the questions it awakens. Such dialectic of questionability allows an exciting kind of reading that focuses on applying the texts to what is humanly relevant in such a way that interpretation comes to serve the purpose of letting texts address the current reality anew, opening up new venues for texts to be alive, to express humanly significant matters beyond what have already been exhausted in a particular era, notably the era which has witnessed the production of a literary work. To fulfill such a hermeneutic praxis of reading, this paper draws on two genuine works of art written by two great poets of the twentieth century, namely T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”.