Dumitru Tucan

The autoreflexive dimension of contemporary literary hermeneutics

The present paper is trying to outline a distinctive feature in the contemporary literary studies, one of theoretical reflection that can be found on the boundary between literary hermeneutics and cultural studies. This feature is implicitly related to the developments of Post-Structuralist thinking, which shifts the focus of the literary studies to the reader and to his/ her own cultural determinations. If the “reader” of the first Post-Structuralist period (mainly problem-oriented and open to theory) is seen as the ideal of “openness” (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida etc), the recent Post-Structuralist “reader” (the one typical of identity hermeneutics - Post-Colonialism, Feminism etc) is a reader who, having critically rejected a certain tradition of interpreting the culture and/ or the literature, continually ascertaining an identity, once marginalised and demonised, having deconstructed cultural fundaments, transforms the process of interpretation into a tool of identity reconstruction. Readers themselves become the image of “closeness”. Given the opposition of openness/ closeness, the present study states the fact that the reader and the reading can’t be discussed beyond certain cultural circumstances, which should be analysed and presented in the same manner like literature itself. Such analysis is a genuinely self-reflective dimension of the literary hermeneutics, which can be noticed in some mainstream schools of thinking, such as the Phenomenology of Reading (R. Ingarden), the Reception Theories (The School of Konstanz - Jauss and Iser), the Semiology of Reading (Eco), and The Reader Response Theory (St. Fish).