ГЕРМЕНЕВТИЧЕСКИЙ МЕТОД ГАДАМЕРА В КОНТЕКСТЕ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ АВТОБИОГРАФИЧЕСКОЙ ПРОЗЫ

Научная статья
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18454/RULB.4.23
Выпуск: № 4 (4), 2015
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Аннотация

В данной статье рассматриваются отдельные аспекты применения комплексного герменевтического метода Ганса-Георга Гадамера как основы изучения автобиографической прозы - концепции образования и опыта, которые признаются необходимыми элементами познания любого художественного текста.

Hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpretation of every life expression: lifestyles, different forms of communication, social relations, morality, religion, art, laws, traditions, states and commonwealths, philosophy, science. Gadamer believed that the phenomenon of understanding and interpretation is not only a special methodological problem of the human sciences. The phenomenon of understanding is the base of all kinds of human’s interactions with the world including science. So it is a vital part of any hermeneutical study of any kind of literary text.

Gadamer believes that the conceptual system, which develops philosophizing influences us in the same way as language in which we live. Truthful and fair scientific thought always requires such a predetermination of thinking. This is a base of a new critical consciousness that inevitably accompanies all responsible science and deduces those linguistic and mental habits, which are formed by person’s communicating with the world. This is the only way we can study different historical traditions performed in literary text and realize all the cultural codes which form our point of views and the reality we think we belong to.

Gadamer says that inductive methods of the natural sciences cannot lead to real understanding of the socio-historical world. Scientists need to understand the phenomenon in its single and historical specificity and this final understanding can be considered as truthful scientific thought. Such a thought may include and affect a large amount of general knowledge of any kind, but it does not fix or give a deeper understanding of the general laws of human development and progress of nations and states. The thought goes deeper and provides the understanding of the nature of those processes itself. [1, 45-46].

Hermeneutical thought and hermeneutical understanding are complex and multi based phenomena and one of their grounds is the concept of education [1, 50-51]. Education builds up the way a person speak, think, understand the world and gives them some special clichés that they use to represent their points of view or feelings. Thus stylistic and narrative structures of any text can be understood only through accurate study of its author’s education which can be considered as a new kind of hermeneutical code which forms the hermeneutical circle of the author of the text at the first place and then reorganise it into a part of a hermeneutical circle of a particular literary text. This statement becomes clearer and more obviously staunch while studying an autobiographical novel where the distance between a particular author and a literary character is minimal and hermeneutical circles of the text and the writer are very close to each other and have more touchpoints than in any other literary genre. Understanding of education of a particular author as a part of an autobiographical novel is a quite simple and primitive process since it is usually a part of the story and all the ways that education of the author affects the text can be easily detected by a scientist. Nevertheless the can be identified within any literary text by a close stylistic analysis which is an essential part of any hermeneutical study.

Reading Henry Adams’ autobiographical novel ‘The Education of Henry Adams’[2] – reading has to be realized as the first and the most important stage of any literary study – the phenomenon of education becomes inseparably close to the idea of experience [1, 421]. Here any kind of life experience is considered as a part of education by the particular author himself and all the stages of this education is carefully described by the author. The statement is clear and quite understandable but is it actually true? Henry Adams has lived for 80 years (more than 28800 days and more than 691200 hours during which he had been gaining new experiences) and the novel that tends to describe the details of his education and experience includes only about 420 pages which means that the novel represents some extractions from the author’s life experience, the essence of it and the first and the most important questions that must be answered here are ‘What kind of extractions are they? What do they have in common (or do they have anything in common)? What is their importance? What is their nature?’ Fortunately, Henry Adams was a well-known person and his biography can be studied in smallest details so there is an opportunity to find some logical and objective answers to those questions but what if pure objective logic cannot give all the answers? The necessity of hermeneutics stands on the fact that the experience presented in autobiographical novels or in any other literary text cannot be studied and then understood by pure scientific objective logic only and only through stylistic and linguistic analyses because they represent the experience of feelings and the education of thought that can be reached only by divination into author’s subjectivity.  Without using of such an approach the understanding of a text is poor, distant from the truth and quite useless even if the text is mostly fictional.    

Gadamer's hermeneutics involves the problem of questions and answers. From the one hand the scientists are being questioned by the text they try to understand and from another hand the text is being asked by scientists. This succession of questions and answers forms the hermeneutical dialogue. Thus understanding of a text is always connected to understand its questions at the first place.

Список литературы

  • Гадамер Х.-Г. Истина и Метод: Основы филос. герменевтики: Пер. с нем./Общ. ред. и вступ. ст. Б. Н. Бессонова. - М.: Прогресс, 1988. - 704 p.

  • Adams Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. - New York.: Oxford University Press, 2008. - 505 p.