Mr. Jin Yuanpu’s Literary Hermeneutics is devoted to constructing a new system of contemporary Chinese literary hermeneutics. Drawing widely on the essence of Western phenomenology, hermeneutics, and reception aesthetics, and striving to excavate the rich heritage of classical Chinese hermeneutic thought—reworking, fusing, expounding, and innovating upon it—the new theoretical framework of literary hermeneutics it thereby constructs both inherits the spiritual character of tradition and displays a distinct contemporaneity, opening a new horizon for the construction of contemporary literary and artistic aesthetics.
A salient feature of Literary Hermeneutics is that it examines and reflects on the discipline from multiple dimensions. Setting out from a macroscopic survey of the basic methodological principles of literary hermeneutics, it advances step by step into the relatively concrete process of reading and understanding, and goes on to explore the ontological questions of literary hermeneutics and the generation of meaning; finally it selects the core category of literary hermeneutics—“the blank of meaning and the indeterminacy of meaning”—for concentrated discussion. The several parts corroborate, supplement, and generate one another, unfolding from many directions the open framework that the book constructs. On the one hand, this lets the author break through the boundaries between philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory, drawing widely and fusing anew; on the other, it gathers in, so far as possible, the main problems bearing on every aspect of literary-hermeneutic theory and discusses them comprehensively and in depth, thereby proposing a series of experimental theses rich in innovative significance. The author offers no simple transplantation of Western hermeneutics, but devotes himself to the localization and sinicization of theory, striving to transcend both Western hermeneutic theory and classical Chinese hermeneutic thought on the basis of fusing the two. This effort shows itself first in the book’s wide absorption of the materials of ancient Chinese literary criticism, which it combs through and from which it expounds the rich hermeneutic thought they contain. Second, the book strives to engage the reception-and-interpretation practice of Chinese literature, drawing from it the theoretical viewpoints of literary hermeneutics.
A further feature of Literary Hermeneutics is its deep historical consciousness, broad cultural vision, and distinct contemporaneity. When Literary Hermeneutics, rather than treating the literary text in isolation for synchronic study, unfolds two infinitely rich text-worlds and reader-worlds, both saturated with cultural import and cultural connotation, together with the history of meaning generated by the interaction of the two worlds, it thereby in effect thoroughly breaks with structuralism’s severance from history and with deconstruction’s practice of banishing history for the sake of the text—and so stands distinctively apart.