Jūratė Levina

The paper outlines Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic exposition of the rationalist foundations of Modernity and his ontology of the work of art grounded in play to use the distinction for an examination of Eliot’s theoretical and poetic discourse. Eliot’s scientist premises are exposed by examining his 1913 paper on anthropology and shown to inform his notions of tradition and the “objective correlative.” Eliot’s reception of Shakespeare’s plays, on the contrary, shows him subsumed by the dynamic of mimetic play as described by Gadamer. To demonstrate the architecture of mimetic play at work in Eliot’s own poetry, the paper offers a close reading of “Preludes,” a poem that stages the experience of the rationalist world of Modernity and reflects on mimetic self-presentation of the lived world in apprehension and poetic discourse.

The paper elaborates on the insight that, in his 1984 address to Joyce scholars “Ulysses Gramophone,” Jacques Derrida performs a methodologically comprehensive phenomenological analysis to show that James Joyce’s "Ulysses" activates the essential structures of experience to make the reader live through the constitution of sense as corporeally lived and grasped meaning. A deceptively casual collection of facts Derrida rehearses in this talk is, also, a Husserlian variation of connections and continuities between the body, in its many manifestations, and the signifying structures of the socio-cultural order and consciousness. This variation leads Derrida’s deconstructive analysis to the discovery of the originary event – the constitution of distinction and, with it, language – in the living flesh which, as Derrida finds in Joyce, is the locus and experience of the sensual, corporeally lived intentionality.

The paper draws on Paul Ricœur’s theory of discourse to propose a hermeneutic definition of the author as a functional and semantic correlative of a work and examine The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot as a case of a comprehensive editorial redesignation of Eliot’s own authorial self-positionings. The editors construct a single chronology for Eliot’s linguistic productions in various stages of composition and publication to present a coherent development of his public persona. The phonocentric focus of the construed line of development and material dimensions of the print medium chosen for the edition inform the reconstruction and lead to disregarding Eliot’s strategies of self-authoring by editing, or failing to completely edit, his writings into larger semantic configurations, or works.

The paper outlines the methodological orientation of Arūnas Sverdiolas’s scholarship and his school towards the praxis of the hermeneutic understanding of concrete cultural phenomena and takes this approach into the field of the phenomenology of literature. The attempt begins with a definition of the literary work in the hermeneutic framework of discourse, in which the work is considered to be an utterance that expresses an originary grasp of world phenomena. This capacity of the work to express is enabled by the operative mechanism of discourse, which binds, by the means of grammar and reference, the linguistic form of the work to the intentional structure of experience. To show this mechanism at work, the paper looks into Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas’s project of self-creation: Sverdiolas examines the poet’s diaries to reconstruct his effort of cultivating his poetic ego along the hermeneutic lines of the existential time, while Nyka-Niliūnas himself expresses this self-conception poetically as a more general phenomenon – the phenomenon of poetic self-consciousness as such – in the poem “Autobiography 1986”.