Hermeneutics, Practical Wisdom, and Cognitive Poetics

It may seem trivial to stress that our background knowledge is essential for literary interpretation, but what about practical wisdom, the inarticulable background knowledge? Can we articulate all the things that we know and are able to do in literary interpretation? Are we fully aware of all the assumptions behind our literary arguments? Instead of generally reflecting the status of hermeneutics at a macro-level, this essay argues that one way for hermeneutics to remain meaningful today is not to be tried as a theoretical whole, but as a source of sporadic inspiring arguments. To show that, at a micro-level, we can evaluate the strength of these arguments case by case without generalizing, we analyze from a cognitive perspective Gadamer’s argument that practical wisdom is crucial for literary interpretation. Using cognitive science to provide insights for literary study does not make the latter subservient to the former. Rather, cognitive poetics is a two-way street where each field complements the other by providing hypotheses and functioning as a testing ground. By demonstrating that we know more than we can tell in literary interpretation and that the three features Aristotle and Gadamer attribute to practical wisdom (contingent, inarticulable, and only learnable through experience) are at least tentatively empirically justified, this essay argues that hermeneutics has offered a noteworthy example for the two-way street of cognitive poetics.

The six ages of Patrick: Yet another return to the dating question

This article returns to the surviving texts of Patrick, apostle to Ireland, in order to refine further his floruit in the fifth century. It argues that Patrick's use of a classical scheme relating age to status clarifies the contexts for the autobiographical details of his life, and that these details can be correlated with the limited historical records that survive for this period. In connecting his excommunication of Coroticus to an Easter controversy c. 455, and his controversial elevation to an episcopal see to a dislocation in clerical authority in Britain c. 441, I argue that Patrick's formal clerical career c. 427-455 matches Richard Hanson's sophisticated literary arguments made in the latter third of the twentieth century. I also propose that the uncertainty over the date of Patrick's death (in a context of exile), as represented by various reports in the Irish and Welsh annals c. 457-493, is inconsequential to his formal period of authority.

Language as Power: Literary Interpretations of the Qur'an in Early Islam

How did pre-modern Muslim exegetes view the mediating role of language in accessing the Qur'an's meaning? What conception of language undergirded their arguments? And what sources of normative authority informed their interpretive canvas? By pursuing this cluster of questions, this essay aims to sketch a picture of the relationship between language and revelation in pre-modern traditions of Qur'an exegesis. More specifically, I conduct a close reading of the Qur'an commentary authored by the prominent Twelver Shi‘i theologian, poet, and historian, al-Sharif al-Radi (d.1015ce). Al-Radi's commentary is a literary exegesis of the Qur'an; in it he presents his concern with ambiguity in the Qur'an and presents language as the hermeneutical key to resolving it. I argue that al-Radi's invocation of varied grammatical rules and his construction of literary arguments were embedded in a particular epistemological and theological conception of the normative relationship between language and revelation. Further, I also interrogate the historically specific conditions and the variety of intellectual currents and vectors (other than sectarian affiliation) that informed al-Radi's hermeneutical choices. By paying close attention to describing the multivalent interpretive traditions that informed al-Radi's Qur'an hermeneutic, this article highlights the conceptual problems attached to the very category of a “Shi‘i Qur'an hermeneutic,” a category that stands authorised through the unsound assumption that sectarian identity and hermeneutical horizons readily correspond in a predictable and seamless fashion. It is precisely this assumption of neat correspondence between sectarian identity and hermeneutical temperament that this essay seeks to challenge and disrupt.

The Development of Jubilees 1 in the Late Second Temple Period

This article argues that there are matenal and literary reasons to view Jub. 1.15b-25 as a redactional addition to the text of Jubilees 1. The matenal arguments build upon a new matenal reconstruction of the 4Q216, which suggests that there was not space in the manuscript for this section of text. With this in mind, literary arguments for viewing this section as an addition are explored, and the late Second Temple period context of the addition of this text is made clear through connections with literature only known through the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are important implications of this analysis for the understanding of the composition and literary growth of Jubilees—which must have been subjugated to some degree of redaction.

Impossibility

This chapter argues that the very prospect of witnessing in late modern public culture is defined by countervailing imperatives: the publicly lauded ideal that bearing witness to the past allows forgiveness, as compared to philosophical, theological, or literary arguments that it is impossible to effectively bear witness to atrocious violence or indescribable tragedy. The combined wisdom of frequently invoked postwar commonplaces holds that witnessing is, in a rhetorical sense, both imperative and impossible. This aporia warrants deeper consideration of the rhetorical, as well as political and moral, goods of witnessing. Chapter 5 identifies the widely promoted ideal of forgiveness in late modernity as a timely test case with which to consider the worldly rhetorical effects that witnessing may be said to produce. Examining popular as well as institutional relationships between witnessing and forgiveness suggests crucial insights regarding the rhetorical efficacy of witnessing as a now-commonplace idiom in Western public culture.

Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin and the Gendering of Toska

This article reviews the evolution of toska in eighteenth-century literary discourse to demonstrate this sentiment's profound connection with notions of femininity. That century's use of toska culminates in Aleksandra Xvostova's then popular Otryvki (Fragments, 1796), the emotional emphases of which were one of the reasons for its success. In fact, we argue that Russian women's writing contains a tradition of emotional expression that is lexically distinct from the male tradition. Xvostova’s emphatic and reiterative use of toska participates in a larger debate about gender and the 'ownership' of personal emotions and it was relevant to literary arguments about "feminization" that involved writers such as Nikolaj Karamzin and Vasilij Zukovskij, but also a number of women authors (e.g. Ekaterina Urusova, Anna Turčaninova, Elizaveta Dolgorukova, Anna Volkova), whose work asserts the right of the female subject to both suffer strong emotion and to express it.

Quem as Não Tem? (Como Escrever Cartas Faz de Nós Pessoas Melhores)

Este ensaio lida com certas características físicas, materiais, simbólicas e sensoriais do objecto “carta”, desde as suas primeiras ocorrências enquanto função da criação de um sistema postal, passando pela modelação da sua natureza que ocorreu no século XIX e foi fundamental para a sua definição, até algumas das suas manifestações contemporâneas. Serão descritos, para o efeito, argumentos pragmáticos, filosóficos e literários.Abstract This essay aims to deal with certain physical, material, symbolic and sensory features of the “letter” as an object, from its first occurrences as a function of the creation of a postal system, through the modeling that occurred in the nineteenth century and was crucial to its definition, until its contemporary forms. For that purpose, a series of pragmatic, philosophical and literary arguments will be discussed. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_1-2_8