Literary and theoretical texts for all your Hermeneutics needs.
Primary Literary Texts
The Aeneid by Virgil (19 BC)
When the ancient epic poem The Aeneid picks up, the Trojan War has come to an end, and just the mention of the word “horse” was enough to make any Trojan’s hair stand on end. Aeneas, a b...
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare (1601)
Hamlet is the play that drives Shakespeare scholars the world over mad with philosophical, literary, and personal questions of all sorts. Master poet T.S. Eliot thought it was a failure. Most...
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
Call me Ishmael. But should you really call him Ishmael? As Moby-Dick's narrator, Ish has got some issues. He’s not always honest with others and himself. He tells Elijah that he knows all about...
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
Three brothers have daddy issues. They react to their father’s evil nature and aren’t sure whether to laugh or cry or go to court once he gets murdered. The Brothers Karamazov (say it with...
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)
Tolkien famously detested allegory—that is, a one-to-one correspondence of symbols (i.e., Aslan from Narnia = Jesus; pig society in Animal Farm = communism). Tolkien, in contrast, practiced...
Primary Theoretical Texts
Hermeneutics and the Study of History by Wihelm Dilthey (1900)
For the Romantics, hermeneutics is not unlike dating (they are Romantic, after all). You listen to your date chat about all sorts of topics, not because you’re interested in knowing about them, b...
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1927)
Heidegger covers a lot more ground than specifically hermeneutic matters, but his description of the hermeneutic circle effectively “de-psychologized” it, moving the hermeneutic focus from the...
Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960)
The first third of Gadamer’s Truth and Method could have been titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about German Aesthetics but Were Afraid to Ask. And come on, that’s a lot, right?Ol’ Ha...
Philosophical Hermeneutics by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1976)
If you have a pressing desire to acquaint yourself with Gadamer’s hermeneutics (and who doesn’t?), then this collection of essays may be your cup of tea. Gadamer addresses the centrality of lan...
The Conflict of Interpretations by Paul Ricoeur (1969)
Paul Ricoeur’s early work in hermeneutics dealt with bringing phenomenology (translation: the study of human consciousness) into dialogue with hermeneutics. He claimed not to be interested in syn...
From Text to Action by Paul Ricoeur (1986)
Follow-up to The Conflict of Interpretations, this set of essays features Ricoeur’s take on the history and task of hermeneutics; interpretation as it relates to understanding and informing human...