The contributors of this volume explore new positions that have the potential to reorient the search for ethics in a post-religious era. They attempt to identify the process of world creation in art and literature as a decidedly ethical-hermeneutical endeavour.
This volume presents a series of forays into the domain of recent hermeneutic reflection in search of an ethics for our time which, as the rupture of (post-Kantian) Berlin and (poststructuralist) Paris hermeneutics implies, cannot be reliably located in the province of either. The contributors put in the spotlight not only the problem of the disjuncture in hermeneutics between a philosophically and a linguistically informed project of understanding; they also introduce new positions that have the potential to reorient the search for ethics in a post-religious era. The most promising of these new positions seek to move beyond the terms of both Berlin and Paris hermeneutics, configuring the process of world-making in art and literature as a limited undertaking where the ethical 'tertium comparationis' is never truly available. The volume therefore supposes that the literature of our time develops its own variety of ethics - and, indeed, of hermeneutics - which does its work in areas not directly available to philosophy or political theory.
Table of contents:
Tim Mehigan/Christian Moser: Introduction: Immanent Hermeneutics - the Search for Ethics
Mirco Limpinsel: Hermeneutic Topicality: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Hermeneutics -
Christian Moser: (Dis-)Appropriating the Heart of Darkness: Application and the Ethics of Understanding in Gadamer, Schleiermacher and Conrad -
Jeff Malpas: Ethics, Place and Hermeneutics -
Mark Freed: Understanding Beyond Immanence: A Quite Different Way of Thinking About Texts -
Paul van Tongeren: 'How to Find Meaning After the Death of God'. Ethics, Hermeneutics and Literature
Sheron Sendziuk: Pretext, Context and Textual Tradition: Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Hermeneutics of Hermeneutics' and the Problem Called Truth -
Nick Heron: Prelinguisticality: Koselleck and the Linguistic Turn -
Stefan Geyer: The Power of Hermeneutics or a Hermeneutics of Power? A Reading of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Childhood of Jesus -
Dana Bönisch: Planetarity, Hermeneutics and a Relational Poetics: Reading J. M. Coetzee and Ian McEwan on the Humanist/Posthumanist Battleground -
Tim Mehigan: Bridge or Barrier? The Scene of Ethics in the Later Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
