Couverture : Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire

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Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire

On the Epistemology of Interpretation

Vincent Crapanzano

Résumé

Treating subjects as diverse as Roman carnivals and Balinese cockfights, circumcision, dreaming, and spirit possession in Morocco, transference in psychoanalysis, self-characterization in teenage girls' gossip, Alice in Wonderland, and Jane Austen's Emma, dialogue models in hermeneutics, and semantic vertigo in Hamlet's Elsinore, these essays look critically at the inner workings of interpretation in human sciences and literary study. In modern Western culture's attempts to interpret and communicate the nature of other cultures, Crapanzano finds a crippling crisis in representation. He shows how the quest for knowledge of "exotic" and "primitive" people is often confused with an unexamined need for self-definition, and he sets forth the resulting interpretive paradoxes, particularly the suppression of any awareness of the play of power and desire in such an approach. What is missing from contemporary theories of interpretation is, in Crapanzano's account, a crucial understanding of the role context plays in any act of communication or its representation-in interpretation itself.

Détails de l'édition

ISBN-13
9780674389809
ISBN-10
0674389808
EAN
9780674389809
Éditeur
Harvard University press (Cambridge, (Mass.))
Date de publication
1 janvier 1992
Langue
en
Pages
406
Dimensions
24 cm
Provenance des données
  • dimensions BnF Catalogue général · 23 juillet 2026
  • language Google Books · 7 septembre 2026
  • page_count Google Books · 7 septembre 2026
  • publication_date BnF Catalogue général · 23 juillet 2026
  • subtitle Google Books · 7 septembre 2026
  • summary Google Books · 7 septembre 2026
  • title Google Books · 7 septembre 2026