Samuel Johnson’s Criticism and Modern Hermeneutic Tradition: Literary Interpretation as Dialogical and Performative Reading
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The aim of this paper is to examine and evaluate Dr. Johnson's view of text as performance in his hermeneutic critical perspective. Johnson does not believe in the purely ontological or autotelic aspects of literature, but rather understands literature in terms of hermeneutics: critical procedures are basically performances. Johnson steadily insists upon the truthfulness and veracity of all writing. He firmly believes that literature is valuable only if it communicates the truth about the nature of reality. He regularly reflects on the relationship of the author's life to his work psychologically or genetically, and more occasionally that of the work to its genre, even though he distrusts rigorous theories of genre. As Hermeneutic assumes the existence of true meaning of a text, so literary criticism tries to discover the specific meaning of any literary text produced by its author. Johnson was a long way from the Absolutist or dogmatist Neoclassical Rationalism. For example, it is very dangerous to forget the empirical bases for Johnson's criticism. The rejection of the Unities is the most famous instance of Johnson's empirical approach in action. Johnson's rejection of the Neoclassical rationalist rule of the Unities remains the prime example of his empirical approach and it was final. But with all his empirical bias Johnson never fell linto the anarchy of experience. He found out a new way of literary interpretation in the tradition of hermeneutics. As a practitioner of most forms of literary criticism, Johnson stands at just the right historical crossroads to be peculiarly valuable for us. Johnson no longer looks like a violent battleground between Classicism and Pre-Romanticism. Johnson is a kind of confluence between these two great currents of English criticism, undisturbed by his clear-sighted perception of the limitations of Neo-Classicism, and unfascinated by new experiments of a domination Pre-Romantics. This relative independence from literary movements has its advantages. And this is another reason for the greatness and authority of Johnson as a critic in term of modern hermeneutics.
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine and evaluate Dr. Johnson's view of text as performance in his hermeneutic critical perspective. Johnson does not believe in the purely ontological or autotelic aspects of literature, but rather understands literature in terms of hermeneutics: critical procedures are basically performances. Johnson steadily insists upon the truthfulness and veracity of all writing. He firmly believes that literature is valuable only if it communicates the truth about the nature of reality. He regularly reflects on the relationship of the author's life to his work psychologically or genetically, and more occasionally that of the work to its genre, even though he distrusts rigorous theories of genre. As Hermeneutic assumes the existence of true meaning of a text, so literary criticism tries to discover the specific meaning of any literary text produced by its author. Johnson was a long way from the Absolutist or dogmatist Neoclassical Rationalism. For example, it is very dangerous to forget the empirical bases for Johnson's criticism. The rejection of the Unities is the most famous instance of Johnson's empirical approach in action. Johnson's rejection of the Neoclassical rationalist rule of the Unities remains the prime example of his empirical approach and it was final. But with all his empirical bias Johnson never fell linto the anarchy of experience. He found out a new way of literary interpretation in the tradition of hermeneutics. As a practitioner of most forms of literary criticism, Johnson stands at just the right historical crossroads to be peculiarly valuable for us. Johnson no longer looks like a violent battleground between Classicism and Pre-Romanticism. Johnson is a kind of confluence between these two great currents of English criticism, undisturbed by his clear-sighted perception of the limitations of Neo-Classicism, and unfascinated by new experiments of a domination Pre-Romantics. This relative independence from literary movements has its advantages. And this is another reason for the greatness and authority of Johnson as a critic in term of modern hermeneutics.
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