Journal of Literary Theory (JLT)

Beck, Laura; Universität Würzburg

Postkoloniale Theorien und Systemtheorie: Ein erstes Zusammentreffen? [Mario Grizelj, Daniela Kirschstein (Hg.), Riskante Kontakte. Postkoloniale Theorien und Systemtheorie?, 2014.]

Fraser, Jake; University of Chicago

English

Futures Past and Present: On Structuralism, Today.[Strukturalismus, heute. Brüche, Spuren, Kontinuitäten, Hannover, Schloss Herrenhausen, 24.-27.2.2016]

Faye, Jan; Universität Würzburg

 1 
Jan Faye 
Hermeneutics and Human Nature 
(Abstract) 
 Full-length article in: JLT 10/1 (2016), 38–57. 
Hermeneutics has for a long time been the central philosophical approach informing the study 
of the humanities. This has, however, in the eyes of some, isolated the study of humanities from 
the study of nature. My primary claim is that the commonly perceived divorce between the 
natural sciences and humanities rests on faulty theories of both scientific methodology and the 
nature of explanation and interpretation as defended by prior schools of philosophy such as 
hermeneutics. In this paper I argue that it is time to reconsider the humanities and to base 
research in the humanities on a philosophical approach that rests its claims on naturalized and 
pragmatic considerations. Such a naturalistic view reflects not only the practice of this research 
better than hermeneutics, but brings the aims of scientific study of cultural phenomena in closer 
contact with the aims we find in the scientific study of natural phenomena. 
The article thus gives a naturalized account of the humanities by focusing on the similarities 
between the scientific practices within the natural sciences and the human sciences. Hence, I 
take issue with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view that understanding always involves interpretation. 
I also deny that understanding is associated with linguistic meaning and that all understanding 
is historically determined. In much recent literature the analysis of interpretation presented by 
the postmodernist schools has exacerbated this situation with its mistaken doctrine that 
understanding rests on interpretation in both the natural sciences and the human sciences. In 
contrast, I hold that understanding is a cognitive organization of information and beliefs. Such 
a conception opens up for the attribution of understanding to other beings apart from humans. 
Animals, just as humans, possess instinctive and acquired understanding without being 
involved in any act of interpretation. I also maintain that even if we isolate reflective 
understanding to human beings, this still does not give us reason to hold that all understanding 
is the immediate result of an interpretation. For instance, experiencing the world around us or 
reading a simple text often does not engage us in an interpretation of what we see or read. This 
is something we comprehend directly whenever we have acquired the relevant concepts in 
virtue of which we grasp our daily life. 
In contrast to the hermeneutic tradition I present a model of interpretation which, I believe, can 
bridge the much decried divorce between the disciplines leading to a unified view of the natural 
sciences and the human sciences. Interpretation, as I understand it, is an active cognitive 
procedure by which we attempt to solve a representational problem in cases where we don’t 
have any immediate comprehension. We have no such immediate grasp of the matter if what 
we see or read doesn’t fit into our background beliefs and knowledge. The purpose of 
interpretation is to yield understanding of what something – taken to represent something else 
– actually is representing, or how something unfamiliar might be represented. Thus an 
interpretation is the creation of either a hypothesis in virtue of which we explain what something 
symbolizes, stands for, designates, refers to, etc., or a hypothesis in virtue of which we construct 
a way of grasping an unknown phenomenon. In both cases the interpreter or the audience, or 
both, would gain an insight into something that was not understood prior to the interpretation. 
 2 
The above explication of interpretation and understanding paves the way for a unified approach 
to both the natural sciences and the humanities. If understanding is nothing but an organism’s 
organization of information and beliefs, then it seems quite evident that the empirical methods 
for gaining understanding in the natural sciences cannot be different from those we must use to 
acquire understanding in the humanities. The evolution by natural selection has established in 
our predecessors a disposition to detect false beliefs and stick to true beliefs. Humans are by 
nature intentional beings that learn from their cognitive successes and cognitive failures. So the 
justification of the use of empirical methods in the humanities as well as in the natural sciences 
is that these methods are grounded in a certain innate cognitive practice of belief acquisition. 
The capacity of learning is based on the cognitive mechanism of induction, and the modern 
specification of various types of empirical methods are abstracted and generalized from our 
mind’s reflection upon the cognitive practice that rests on this mechanism. 
In opposition to Dilthey and his school, Gadamer claimed that the humanities were not unique 
in demanding the use of methods different than those used in the natural sciences. However, he 
argued that objective interpretation of a text was not within the range of literary study. His 
reason for saying so was that any interpretation is bounded by a historical perspective and that 
the author’s intention has no role to play in an interpreter’s interpretation of a literary text. I 
believe he is wrong. I argue that Gadamer ignored a distinction between the act and the topic 
of interpretation. All interpreters are situated in a historical context and their interpretive 
hypotheses may be coloured by the existence of such a context. But if the topic of one’s 
interpretive hypotheses is the author’s intentions, which exist independently of hypothesis 
itself, and if one uses adequate evidence and empirical methods to justify these interpretations, 
the resulting insight will be as objective as something can be. Therefore, I conclude that a 
naturalistic stance to the humanities is superior to any hermeneutic stance. 
 
 
 
 
 
References 
Betti, Emilio, Hermeneutics as the General Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften, in: 
Josef Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics. Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and 
Critique, London et al. 1980, 51–94. 
Castro, Leyre/Ed Wasserman, Crows Understand Analogies, Scientific American (2015), 
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-understand-analogies (01.12.2015). 
Fagot, Joël/Roger K.R. Thompson, Generalized Relational Matching by Guinea Baboons 
(Papio papio) in Two-by-Two-Item Analogy Problem, Psychological Science 22:10 
(2011), 1304–1309. [Web of Science] 
Faye, Jan, Rethinking Science. A Philosophical Introduction to the Unity of Science, Aldershot 
2002. 
Faye, Jan, After Postmodernism. A Naturalistic Reconstruction of the Humanities, London 
2012. 
 3 
Faye, Jan, The Nature of Scientific Thinking. On Interpretation, Explanation and 
Understanding, London 2014. 
Føllesdal, Dagfinn, Hermeneutics and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method, Dialectica 33 
(1979), 319–336. [CrossRef] 
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, transl. by Joel Weinsheimer/Donald G. Marshall, 
New York 21993. 
Hirsch, Eric Donald, Validity in Interpretation, New Haven 1967. 
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Natural and the Human Sciences, in: David R. Hiley/James F. 
Bohman/Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretative Turn. Philosophy, Science, and 
Culture, Ithaca, NY 1991, 17–24. 
Truppa, Valentina et al., Same/Different Concept Learning by Capuchin Monkeys in Matching-
to-Sample Tasks, PLoS ONE 6:8 (2011), 
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0023809 (21.12.2015). 
 
2016-05-16 
JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990 
Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved. 
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author 
and JLTonline. 
For other permission, please contact JLTonline. 
How to cite this item: 
Abstract of: Jan Faye, Hermeneutics and Human Nature. 
In: JLTonline (16.05.2016)  
Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-003297 
Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-003297  
 


Hermeneutics and Human Nature

Folde, Christian; Universität Würzburg

 1 
Christian Folde 
Interpretation and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method: A 
Dilemma  
(Abstract) 
 Full-length article in: JLT 10/1 (2016), 58–82. 
The Norwegian philosopher Dagfinn Føllesdal and his German colleague Heide Göttner argued 
independently from one another that the interpretation of literary texts proceeds by the 
hypothetico-deductive method. In this paper I critically examine their view. My interest, 
however, is systematic rather than exegetical. After elucidating the claim and working through 
some case studies, I discuss several objections raised in the debate. My central point is that the 
view runs into a dilemma: there is no variant of the view which is both tenable and capable of 
showing that the interpretation of literature is a respectable scientific activity. 
Among other things Føllesdal (1979) and Göttner (1973) argue that the justification of 
hypotheses in interpretations of works of literature proceeds by the hypothetico-deductive 
method. I refer to this as the HD-view. Systematically, it has much to offer. If interpretation is 
hypothetico-deductive, then it seems to inherit all the alleged merits of this method: exactness, 
intersubjectivity, reliability, and rationality, among other things. Interpreting literary works 
would turn out to be a proper scientific activity subject to the same general standards as, say, 
experimental physics. The interpretation of literary works is thereby demystified and rendered 
comprehensible. Also, the HD-view would speak in favor of the idea that all empirical science 
is equal, unified by a single method and the same general goals, among them, arguably, 
pursuing the truth and generating knowledge. 
In the first section of my paper I elucidate the HD-view in more detail. The key element of the 
view is the hypothetico-deductive method. The idea of the HD-method is roughly this. One 
forms a hypothesis which often cannot be directly verified (e. g., all ravens are black), deduces 
from this hypothesis in conjunction with auxiliary assumptions (e. g., this is a raven) all kinds 
of empirical consequences (e. g., this raven is black), and checks these consequences: 
observation either confirms or disconfirms them. If the consequences are disconfirmed, the 
hypothesis (or the auxiliary assumptions) should be discarded. If, however, the consequences 
are confirmed, the hypothesis (and the auxiliary assumptions) is also confirmed (to a certain 
degree) – it fits in with our experience. Importantly, the HD-method concerns not the genesis 
but the justification of a hypothesis. 
After pointing out some of the philosophical issues surrounding the HD-method, I distinguish 
several variants of the HD-view that will play a role when assessing the objections directed 
against it. Finally, I discuss issues that arise when transferring the HD-method to the 
interpretation of literature, such as the role of hypotheses, auxiliary assumptions, data and 
observation. 
The second part of my paper concerns Føllesdal’s and Göttner’s case studies and their positive 
arguments for the HD-view. I go through their examples (interpretations of Ibsen’s Peer 
Gyntand Walther’s Nemt, frowe, disen kranz) and point out some general worries, in particular 
with the deductive parts of their reconstructions. 
 2 
The third and final section addresses several objections that have been raised against the HD-
view. Some argue that the view is too strict: other methods of justification are used in 
interpretations. Others argue that the view is too broad: some (kinds of) interpretation 
hypotheses cannot be justified by the HD-method. A third objection has it that the view fails 
because some interpretations cannot, even in principle, be (dis)confirmed. Some take the view 
to be a false descriptive claim. Others take it as a misguided normative claim. Finally, the view 
is said to be insufficient because it does not supply criteria to decide between rival 
interpretations. None of these objections is found to be fatal. However, the HD-view must be 
modified to circumvent each objection. These modifications result in the following variant of 
the view: the justification of empirical hypotheses in argumentative interpretations of literary 
works can be reconstructed as proceeding, among other things, by the HD-method. 
Although this claim seems tenable it is far from the original view. This would not be a problem, 
if it were to meet the main goal the HD-view was meant to achieve, viz. show that the 
interpretation of literary works is a kosher scientific activity. Unfortunately, the modified 
variant does not deliver the goods. Only a fragment of all interpretations of literary works 
conducted in literary studies is rendered scientific. This result does not do justice to scientific 
practice. And it does not offer a methodology for all interpretations. 
The result is a dilemma: the modified version of the HD-view is correct but misses its goal 
whereas the original version does meet this goal but is incorrect. The choice is between 
admitting that the project failed and saying something false. 
The second horn of the dilemma – meeting the goal but saying something false – is no option 
for a rational being. Thus, friends of the original idea should opt for the first horn: admit that 
the project has failed and make something of the modified variant. 
One way to go is to become revisionary and claim that only a fraction of all interpretations 
conducted in literary studies is actually scientific. This entails a ban from science for a bulk of 
current interpretative practice. I am not aware of anyone in the literature who defends this 
position. It is certainly not the position of Føllesdal or Göttner. And it faces the problem of 
explaining why the interpretations characterized by it are the only scientific ones. 
I conclude that it is still a desideratum of literary studies to come up with a convincing 
methodology of interpretation. 
 
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 3 
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(1986), 229–255. 
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Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 17 (1975), 105–116. 
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(1975), 40–42. 
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(20.12.2015). 
 
 
 
 
 5 
2016-05-16 
JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990 
Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved. 
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author 
and JLTonline. 
For other permission, please contact JLTonline. 
How to cite this item: 
Abstract of: Christian Folde, Interpretation and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method: A Dilemma. 
In: JLTonline (16.05.2016)  
Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-003306 
Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-003306  
 


Interpretation and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method: A Dilemma

Danneberg, Lutz; Universität Würzburg

Albrecht, Andrea

Beobachtungen zu den Voraussetzungen des hypothetisch-deduktiven und des hypothetisch-induktiven Argumentierens im Rahmen einer hermeneutischen Konzeption der Textinterpretation

of Contents, Table; Universität Würzburg

Groeben, Norbert; Universität Würzburg

Pahlke, Florian A.

 1 
Norbert Groeben / Florian A. Pahlke 
Was kann und soll Rationale Rekonstruktion hermeneutischer 
Interpretationsansätze (nicht) leisten?  
(Abstract) 
 Full-length article in: JLT 10/1 (2016), 83–109. 
In the field of empirical analytic sciences, the approach of ›Rational Reconstruction‹ offers a 
way to use older theories that are fruitful in the Humanities even today, rather than merely 
explicate their historical value. It denotes a procedure that attempts to adapt a historically earlier 
theoretical approach, in its precision and consistency, to current meta-theoretical standards, yet 
without altering the underlying concept of this approach in the process. According to this 
conception, the goal is to represent what it is that a theory could accomplish were it expanded 
and supplemented by new levels of knowledge. In contrast to classical hermeneutics, Rational 
Reconstruction is thus geared toward an approach that is not purely descriptive but also 
prescriptive, insofar as the criteria of precision and logical consistency are combined with the 
criterion of similarity (resemblance to the starting theory). In addition to a historical, diachronic 
consideration of theories, Rational Reconstruction displays its particular appeal in precisely the 
possibility of also explicating theoretical approaches in a systematic, synchronic manner, that 
is, in compliance with current standards of the theory of science as well as the content of 
theoretical findings. In addition to providing information about a historical theory, the result of 
such a reconstruction is in particular the elaboration of historical theories in regard to their 
content and (methodological) structure through a contemporary updating. 
 
To this end, we have to maintain a balance between a descriptive and a prescriptive method: 
The Rational Reconstruction must neither overrun the descriptive function, by attempting to 
justify any given theoretical approach, nor shall its prescriptive function lead through the 
backdoor, as it were, to the stipulation of new theoretical approaches. Nevertheless, there 
remains a wide range of possibilities within which Rational Reconstruction can become a 
fruitful procedure. Precisely because it is not only concerned with showing what a theory 
wished to state at the time of its formation, there arises both the extreme that theories cannot be 
rationally reconstructed and the extreme that in the end the scientific criteria have to be 
expanded in order to do justice to an existing theoretical approach. 
 
Seeking to elaborate this scope of Rational Reconstruction with reference to hermeneutic 
interpretive approaches, this essay differentiates and discusses by way of example four 
paradigmatic cases, namely: 
 
1. Rational Reconstruction as a means to – further – explicate existing theories (rationality 
explication). In this case, it can be shown that the basic structure of a method of interpretation 
already fulfills contemporary standards of the theory of science, and merely can be made more 
transparent. By explicating the hypothetical-deductive method in the interpretation of literature, 
 2 
we show in the following what an adequate implementation of the criteria of rationality 
underlying it might look like in the framework of an interpretive praxis; 
 
2. Rational Reconstruction applied to theories which by all means lay the same claim to 
rationality yet, due to earlier states of knowledge, cannot as optimally implement them as is 
possible with the content and meta-theoretical knowledge of today. Here, Rational 
Reconstruction can help to expand and clarify (even more) such theoretical approaches 
(rationality elaboration). Titzmann’s sketch of an integrative literary history serves here as an 
ideal exemplification of a theory representing a constructive starting point that can be profitably 
deepened through further conceptual precision; 
 
3. Rational Reconstruction as evidence of the non-rational: It holds for some theories that 
structurally they do not fulfill basic meta-theoretical requirements, and not in the least because 
they themselves programmatically reject these requirements. Rational Reconstruction here 
serves as a means for exemplifying this refusal (rationality negation). A pertinent example from 
the field of deconstructionism will show the impossibility of a rational reconstruction of this 
approach, on the one hand, and the additional value that it nonetheless can have for literary 
theory, on the other hand. 
 
4. Rational Reconstruction as a touchstone for scientific criteria: In the case of a theory 
containing variations of precision and consistency, which in this form have previously not been 
contained in the meta-theoretical canon of scientific criteria, the procedure of Rational 
Reconstruction can contribute to the expansion or adaptation of these criteria. We would like 
to show that there are areas in which, for good reasons, previous models of rationality should 
be expanded and supplemented (rationality adaptation). 
 
The examples used in this essay provide a look at the possible application of Rational 
Reconstruction. The essay thereby shows how an utterly heterogeneous set of theoretical 
approaches can be constructively and fruitfully elaborated in an improved (more precise) 
variant and hence, if need be, revived. Likewise, it can be shown that the procedure of Rational 
Reconstruction is able to demonstrate the limits of rationality of certain theories and, as a result, 
to obtain the added value of rational precision and constructiveness for the entire discipline. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 
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Was kann und soll Rationale Rekonstruktion hermeneutischer Interpretationsansätze (nicht) leisten?

Rupp, Jan

 1 
 
Jan Rupp 
Unbound and Rebound: New Perspectives in Feminist and Queer 
Narrative Theory 
 
• Robyn Warhol/Susan S. Lanser (eds.), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and 
Feminist Interventions. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press 2015. X, 398 
pp. [Preis: EUR 83,50]. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1280-6. 
As Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser explain in the introduction to their co-edited volume, 
its title including »a term of Promethean audacity« is in reference to »a field that is no stranger 
to derivations from the Greek« (1). Yet, paradoxically, part of what feminist and, more recently, 
queer approaches have been up against is precisely narratology’s structuralist legacy of a 
formalist, ahistorical and frequently Greek-inflected inventory of terms and distinctions. What 
is more, the field’s male and masculinist outlook in terms of founding representatives and 
concepts, as well as possible heteronormative connotations of narrative as a forward-driven 
phenomenon putatively in line with a reproductive imperative do not exactly add to making 
narrative theory a likely candidate for feminist and queer appropriation. In any case, the 
mythological metaphor in the present volume’s title underscores the titanic measure of the task 
at hand. It is taken up by an interdisciplinary group of US-based scholars working with 
narrative, feminist and/or queer theory, who met for a Project Narrative Symposium organized 
by Warhol in 2011 and whose contributions are gathered in the collection under review. 
One of the major strengths of Narrative Theory Unbound is that it succeeds in preserving, as 
much as possible, the lively, multivoiced and also conflicting discussions of the original 
symposium. Fifteen full-length essays are arranged in four large sections, with another set of 
five shorter response essays called »commentaries« coming in the volume’s fifth part, which in 
turn is followed by a concluding afterword. The commentaries review closely the preceding 
contributions and draw or highlight connections, maintaining a sense of the dynamic, back-and-
forth character of oral debate and conversation, which is complemented by frequent cross-
references within and between the longer essays. Because of the linearity of print, the result is 
not quite a »hypertext« (16), as Warhol and Lanser suggest might be fitting, but the volume is 
not a streamlined, let alone definitive account, either. It deliberately chooses open-endedness 
over closure and strict teleology, and as an academic publication productively enacts qualities 
which feminist and queer critics have found to be underrepresented in the study of narrative. 
This quasi hypertext provides an undogmatic and flexible framework in which to take stock of 
past achievements and sound out future prospects of queer and feminist narrative theory. Given 
the proliferation and marketability of cultural and context-sensitive, so-called ›postclassical‹ 
narratologies over the past few decades, such a collaborative, volume-long consideration seems 
almost overdue. Feminist approaches are rightly credited with pioneering contextualizing 
readings of narrative by building cultural aspects like sex and gender into the formalist analyses 
of ›classical‹ structuralist narratology. Lanser’s and Warhol’s own individual work in formative 
articles and monographs from the 1980s onwards is frequently invoked in the pages of 
Narrative Theory Unbound. However, this is the first collection of feminist narrative criticism 
 2 
in almost twenty years, as the editors point out, and the first-ever collection of queer narrative 
theory. 
Generally, the essays gathered are written in a spirit of »exhortation over celebration« (40), to 
borrow a phrase from Lanser’s contribution »Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) 
Narratology«. To be sure, celebration plays a big part as well, not least by dint of many personal 
anecdotes which lend the book an air of collective memoir, of a field in which the lines between 
academia and activism are characteristically blurred. As for exhortation, the essays can be seen 
to delineate and already practice one or several of four major directions of future research in 
combination: a continued or renewed interest in form and the critical apparatus of narratology; 
a concern with intersectionality theory; a call for extending canons of texts against which queer 
and feminist readings have been tested; and inclusion of non-literary and non-fictional 
narratives as well as interdisciplinary projects. 
While the four directions or foci of this research agenda do not square neatly with the volume’s 
four main sections, in fact often cut across them, including the fifth section of commentaries, 
the case for ›more‹ narratology is arguably most pronounced in Lanser’s programmatic essay, 
which opens the volume’s first section »Narrative Discourse Unbound«. In it, she reemphasizes 
the role of narrative form as cultural content and raises the question, among others, whether 
free indirect discourse might be revalued as a particular formal strategy employed by writers 
like Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield in their capacity as »queer(ish) folk 
as well as modernists« (31). The other essays in the volume’s first section are similarly invested 
in aspects of form. In »Out of the Bind: From Structure to System in Popular Narratives«, 
Judith Roof analyses a wide range of remakes of »Little Red Riding Hood«, arguing that these 
and the gender concepts inscribed in the fairy-tale are not reducible to an underlying structural 
pattern of binary elements, but the result of narrative as a multiply recombinant system which 
»offers conceptual tools for revising the impasses of gender inequality« (57). In »Giving an 
Account of Themselves: Metanarration and the Structure of Address in The Office and The Real 
Housewives«, Robyn Warhol details how by using metanarration and a different camera-
mediated form of address, which directly involves the audience, the former show manages to 
convey gendered subjectivity in a way that paradoxically feels more ›real‹ than in the latter. 
Peggy Phelan, in her essay »Hypothetical Focalization and Queer Grief«, turns to this term 
coined by David Herman for a type of focalization entertained as conceivable but not realized 
in a given text, suggesting that it »seems particularly valuable for reading queer 
autobiographies« in which »a hypothetical perspective about sexuality becomes a requisite one 
for the narrator« (83). 
The essays in the second section, »Intersectional Narrative Theories«, all enrich feminist and 
queer readings by correlating sex and gender, and accommodating their intersections, with 
additional identity categories such as race, class, and region. Religion, as another important but 
so far little studied factor is added in Susan Stanford Friedman’s instructive genre-mapping 
discussion of the female Muslim bildungsroman in »Religion, Intersectionality, and 
Queer/Feminist Narrative Theory: The Bildungsromane of Ahdaf Soueif, Leila Aboulela, and 
Randa Jarrar«. Drawing on her complex previous work on narrative empathy, Suzanne Keen 
combines intersectionality with a promising interdisciplinary perspective for queer and feminist 
approaches in »Intersectional Narratology in the Study of Narrative Empathy«. Sue J. Kim 
pursues similar questions in »Empathy and 1970s Novels by Third World Women«, while again 
bringing aspects of race, class, and location into the picture. Taken together, the three essays 
offer a welcome and much-needed complication of queer and feminist analyses in and of the 
West, importantly also by turning to new bodies of texts. 
 
 3 
In »Lifewriting, Gender, Sex«, the collection’s third section, the value of new canons, including 
non-fictional and non-literary narratives, as well as of interdisciplinary collaboration is further 
demonstrated. In »Screenshots in the Longue Durée: Feminist Narratology, Digital Humanities, 
and Collective Biographies of Women«, Alison Booth presents a project on identifying patterns 
in a database of nineteenth- and twentieth-century short biographies of famous women. Her 
essay offers a point of convergence with Lanser’s interest in empirical methods such as Franco 
Moretti’s concept of ›distant reading‹, for the possibility it might offer to trace feminist- and 
queer-inflected narrative forms across a wider geographical and temporal space. In »The Space 
of Graphic Narrative: Mapping Bodies, Feminism, and Form«, Hillary Chute adds a topical 
genre to the debate and explores its autobiographical potential for women writers and for 
feminist criticism. The remaining two essays in this section attend to queer lifewriting. Both 
»The Narrative Case for Queer Biography« by Wendy Moffat, author of a biography of E.M. 
Forster, and Jesse Matz in his »›No Future‹ vs. ›It Gets Better‹: Queer Prospects for Narrative 
Temporality« document but also modify existing scepticism against temporality and 
teleological narrative in queer theory. 
In »Emplotment, or the Shapes of Stories«, section four of Narrative Theory Unbound, the first 
two essays explore topics related to queer lives and life stories, with Paul Morrison and 
Valerie Rohy reading two classics of the queer literary corpus in »Maurice, or Coming Out 
Straight« and »Strange Influence: Queer Etiology in The Picture of Dorian Gray« respectively. 
By contrast, the other two contributions in this section turn to somewhat different narratives 
and disciplines. Thus, in her essay, Susan Fraiman looks at »Gendered Narratives in Animal 
Studies«, while Kay Young engages with stories told by neuroscientists about sex, gender and 
the brain in »Sex–Text–Cortex«. Specifically, Young rejects »narratives which define us in 
terms of a crude biological determinism« (316), and highlights the ways in which these 
construct notions of gender identity and sexual orientation, rather than presenting scientific 
facts. 
Tellingly entitled »Challenges: Un/doing Narrative Theory«, the book’s fifth section assembles 
five commentaries by Abby Coykendall, Martin Joseph Ponce, Claudia Breger, Ellen Peel 
and Shalyn Claggett. It is worth singling out two of the more provocative voices, which 
underline the collection’s deliberately provisional character, hinted at by Warhol and Lanser at 
the end of their introduction: »our story is not likely to come to closure any time soon« (19). In 
the commentaries, this goes for discussions around individual essays as well as for notes of 
warning about the volume’s project at large. Thus, in »Towards a Queer Feminism; Or, 
Feminist Theories and/as Queer Narrative Studies«, Coykendall suspects lingering hierarchies 
and orders of precedence in which the debate is framed. With a view to paratexts such as the 
collection’s title she points out a »tacit primacy granted to narrative theory over either feminist 
or queer theory« and warns against treating the latter »as derivations of the historically 
phallocentric institution of narratology« (326). She also prefers »narrative studies« as a more 
flexible and interdisciplinary rubric over the »exclusionary legacy of an ›ology‹« (332). In his 
»Queer/Feminist/Narrative: On the Limits of Reciprocal Engagement«, Ponce expresses similar 
reservations when he objects to »narrative theory’s imperialist appropriation (its treatment of 
narratives by women, sexual dissidents, or racial and colonized others as ›raw material‹ for 
testing out the reach of theoretical frameworks)« (335). Moreover, he is sceptical of the 
supposedly easy intersectional alliance between feminist or queer and ethnic studies, observing 
that »although queer theory has acknowledged intellectual and political debts to feminism, it 
has nonetheless tended to elide the work of theorists and activists of color« (337–338). 
No doubt a landmark publication, it is to the credit of Narrative Theory Unbound that it 
accommodates constructive dissent on precisely how to unbind narrative theory, or whether at 
all, and on how to tie narratology or narrative studies to feminist and queer concerns in turn. 
 4 
This Promethean task is positively unfinished and ongoing, but the present volume covers some 
crucial new ground and will be indispensable reading for scholars working in the fields of 
narratology, queer and feminist studies. The articles collected significantly expand extant 
studies of narrative form from the perspective of gender and sexuality, and they combine their 
analyses in novel ways with interdisciplinary and contextualist approaches from areas as diverse 
as the digital humanities, neuronarrative research, intersectionality theory, and postcolonial 
studies. Whether and how these lines of enquiry will be taken up will also depend on greater 
resonance with mainstream narratological debates in a situation where recent anthologies have 
given only little room to issues of sex and gender, as Coykendall laments, pointing to a larger 
»ongoing devaluation of feminist and queer studies« (328). Another open question, highlighted 
by Irene Kancendes in her afterword, concerns the »Anglocentrism« (367) of North American 
academia. This is a question of canons and texts as well as of which scholarly communities 
select, read and discuss them with which other communities. For the time being, the present 
collection is a tribute to the intellectual and institutional context it is facilitated by, while it 
might also be culturally specific to it. 
PD Dr. Jan Rupp 
Universität Heidelberg 
Anglistisches Seminar
2016-07-30 
JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990 
Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved. 
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author 
and JLTonline. 
For other permission, please contact JLTonline. 
How to cite this item: 
Jan Rupp, Unbound and Rebound: New Perspectives in Feminist and Queer Narrative Theory. (Review of: 
Robyn Warhol/Susan S. Lanser (eds.), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Columbus: 
The Ohio State University Press 2015.) 
In: JLTonline 30.07.2016)  
Persistent Identifier urn:nbn:de:0222-003327 
Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-003327 


Unbound and Rebound: New Perspectives in Feminist and Queer Narrative Theory [Robyn Warhol/Susan S. Lanser (eds.), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, 2015.]

Kotte, Eugen; Universität Vechta

Königsweg oder Irrweg? Ein Vierteljahrhundert Neue Kulturwissenschaft(en) in Deutschland [Kulturwissenschaft(en): Bilanz und Perspektiven, Universität Vechta, 06.–08.11.2015.]

Willand, Marcus; Universität Würzburg

 1 
Marcus Willand 
Historische Angemessenheit als hermeneutisches Konzept, 
Argument oder Problem?  
(Abstract) 
 Full-length article in: JLT 10/1 (2016), 170–198. 
In the field of empirical analytic sciences, the approach of ›Rational Reconstruction‹ offers a 
way to use older theories that are fruitful in the Humanities even today, rather than merely 
explicate their historical value. It denotes a procedure that attempts to adapt a historically earlier 
theoretical approach, in its precision and consistency, to current meta-theoretical standards, yet 
without altering the underlying concept of this approach in the process. According to this 
conception, the goal is to represent what it is that a theory could accomplish were it expanded 
and supplemented by new levels of knowledge. In contrast to classical hermeneutics, Rational 
Reconstruction is thus geared toward an approach that is not purely descriptive but also 
prescriptive, insofar as the criteria of precision and logical consistency are combined with the 
criterion of similarity (resemblance to the starting theory). In addition to a historical, diachronic 
consideration of theories, Rational Reconstruction displays its particular appeal in precisely the 
possibility of also explicating theoretical approaches in a systematic, synchronic manner, that 
is, in compliance with current standards of the theory of science as well as the content of 
theoretical findings. In addition to providing information about a historical theory, the result of 
such a reconstruction is in particular the elaboration of historical theories in regard to their 
content and (methodological) structure through a contemporary updating. 
To this end, we have to maintain a balance between a descriptive and a prescriptive method: 
The Rational Reconstruction must neither overrun the descriptive function, by attempting to 
justify any given theoretical approach, nor shall its prescriptive function lead through the 
backdoor, as it were, to the stipulation of new theoretical approaches. Nevertheless, there 
remains a wide range of possibilities within which Rational Reconstruction can become a 
fruitful procedure. Precisely because it is not only concerned with showing what a theory 
wished to state at the time of its formation, there arises both the extreme that theories cannot be 
rationally reconstructed and the extreme that in the end the scientific criteria have to be 
expanded in order to do justice to an existing theoretical approach. 
Seeking to elaborate this scope of Rational Reconstruction with reference to hermeneutic 
interpretive approaches, this essay differentiates and discusses by way of example four 
paradigmatic cases, namely: 
1. Rational Reconstruction as a means to – further – explicate existing theories (rationality 
explication). In this case, it can be shown that the basic structure of a method of interpretation 
already fulfills contemporary standards of the theory of science, and merely can be made more 
transparent. By explicating the hypothetical-deductive method in the interpretation of literature, 
we show in the following what an adequate implementation of the criteria of rationality 
underlying it might look like in the framework of an interpretive praxis; 
2. Rational Reconstruction applied to theories which by all means lay the same claim to 
rationality yet, due to earlier states of knowledge, cannot as optimally implement them as is 
possible with the content and meta-theoretical knowledge of today. Here, Rational 
 2 
Reconstruction can help to expand and clarify (even more) such theoretical approaches 
(rationality elaboration). Titzmann’s sketch of an integrative literary history serves here as an 
ideal exemplification of a theory representing a constructive starting point that can be profitably 
deepened through further conceptual precision; 
3. Rational Reconstruction as evidence of the non-rational: It holds for some theories that 
structurally they do not fulfill basic meta-theoretical requirements, and not in the least because 
they themselves programmatically reject these requirements. Rational Reconstruction here 
serves as a means for exemplifying this refusal (rationality negation). A pertinent example from 
the field of deconstructionism will show the impossibility of a rational reconstruction of this 
approach, on the one hand, and the additional value that it nonetheless can have for literary 
theory, on the other hand. 
4. Rational Reconstruction as a touchstone for scientific criteria: In the case of a theory 
containing variations of precision and consistency, which in this form have previously not been 
contained in the meta-theoretical canon of scientific criteria, the procedure of Rational 
Reconstruction can contribute to the expansion or adaptation of these criteria. We would like 
to show that there are areas in which, for good reasons, previous models of rationality should 
be expanded and supplemented (rationality adaptation). 
The examples used in this essay provide a look at the possible application of Rational 
Reconstruction. The essay thereby shows how an utterly heterogeneous set of theoretical 
approaches can be constructively and fruitfully elaborated in an improved (more precise) 
variant and hence, if need be, revived. Likewise, it can be shown that the procedure of Rational 
Reconstruction is able to demonstrate the limits of rationality of certain theories and, as a result, 
to obtain the added value of rational precision and constructiveness for the entire discipline. 
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Historische Angemessenheit als hermeneutisches Konzept, Argument oder Problem?

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