Lunch Lectures Breitenwischer - Knowing, Not Knowing, and the Quest for Understanding: Ignorance and Literary Hermeneutics

 
Literary hermeneutics are driven by an inherent need to produce meaning and understanding through the interpretation of literary texts. In my lunch lecture I want to show that ignorance (understood as an emphatic mode of embracing the unknown and one’s own not-knowing) is an essential part of literary hermeneutics. Drawing on seminal works by 19th-century US thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson, German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, and more recent hermeneutic endeavors by scholars working in the tradition of Constance School reception aesthetics my talk aims to provide an understanding of disciplinary ignorance that is based on a rejection of knowledge (Wissen) for the sake of gaining understanding (Verstehen). Meaning (Bedeutung), in that sense, is not produced by knowing but by dedicating oneself to conquer ever-new territories of the unknown.