In Reply to: Good hermaneutic posted by Carol on July 11, 2004 at 10:00:14:
Your use of the word "hermeneutic" reminded me of a paper I wrote several years ago. Forgive me for being so pedantic, but the word is not confined to the interpretation of biblical scripture. It comes from the Greek word meaning "interpret" and refers to the study of the methodological principles of interpretation. Historically, many ancient texts -- such as the Bible in Western religions and ancient Chinese texts including the writings of Sun Tzu -- have accumulated layers of commentary, which are published along with the work. In each layer, subsequent reviewers comment on the original text, the historical context of its writing, the nature of translations over time, and on the contexts of earlier interpreters. In the context of sensemaking, hermeneutics is relevant because there can be more than one way to interpret information and because hermeneutic practice places demands on annotation systems for successively revealing layers of commentary.
Btw, my paper was on the American poet, H.D. For anyone interested, here are the opening paragraphs of that paper:
The poetry of Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. as Ezra Pound later christened her, encapsulates the essence of literary modernism. Born in 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, H.D. came of age in an age of uncertainty so that by the time she entered college in 1905 her personal quest for identity coincided with the quest amongst poets to find new modes of expression that could make sense of the modern world. At the center of modernist concerns was the quest for order and new meanings in a rapidly changing world. An important element of that quest, for the emerging H.D., as a woman, were "questions of identity revolving around the conflicting demands of sexuality, gender, and vocation" (Friedman, Dictionary 119).
Family and education represented to H.D. the continuity of Victorian feminine conventionality, and it was only outside such patriarchal institutions that her artistic ambitions had room to grow. Only in her personal relationships with other poets, notably Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Frances Gregg, did H.D.'s artistic identity begin to take shape.In seeking to define for herself what it meant to be a modern poet, H.D. turned to classicism, not with a "nostalgia for a golden age of past culture" as did her male counterparts such as Yeats, Pound, and Eliot (Ostriker, Thieves 73), but with a vision to reclaim the female experience as written into our male biased cultural foundations. By revising various classical myths that have grown out of patriarchal traditions, many of H.D.'s poems challenge the gender stereotypes embodied in those myths, and give voices to female figures that have otherwise been silent throughout the centuries.