Every now and then I muse about the required reading for a seminar in the sort of rhetorical/pragmatic/semiological hermeneutics I advocate. This morning, the reading list would include
- Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana books 1 & 2
- Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’
- Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (my translation from Archive.org)
- Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘What Is A Sign?‘, ‘Three Trichotomies of Signs‘
- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
- Magritte, ‘Words and Images’
- Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and ‘On the Concept of History’
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, inter alia.
- Willard Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’
- Nelson Goodman, ‘Words, Works, Worlds’
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
- Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies
- Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, Limited Inc, Of Grammatology
- Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’
- David Antin, ‘Tuning’
- Jeffrey Stout, ‘What Is The Meaning of a Text?’
- Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value
- Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations and Beautiful Evidence
- John V. Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini (tl;dr > ‘Franciscan Exegesis’ by John W. Dixon)
- Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
- James K A Smith, The Fall of Interpretation (available first edition here)
- Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning
- Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading
- Margaret Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians, and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics
And, of course, sundry things that I’ve written. Sorry that some of these items are so expensive.
What have I left out? Some of you know me well enough to be able to remind me.
Plato’s Ion seems to fit the bill. It’s funny, too.
Funny is good. Which reminds me of Lyotard’s ‘Sur la force des faibles’, of which I once upon a time made a translation.
What, no Blanchot (e.g. The Writing of the Disaster) or Deleuze’s Logic of Sense? The list has a lot of the ‘classics’ which generally bodes well.
Christopher, I came by Deleuze after I was already pretty well tracked, so he didn’t come to mind as immediately — but that’s right. And I must confess to being innocent of Blanchot, so now I have something more to chew on.
J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words.
Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
Frank Kermode, The Art of Telling (US) or Essays on Fiction 1971-82 (UK)
Nicholas Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus
And this class would span how many semesters?
Understanding Comics sounds like a fab one to read.
@Judy: As many as it takes!
@Laura: It’s a classic, a real landmark — it started a series of intense arguments among comics authors.
Plus, Margaret remembered that I should include
Jane Tompkins, ‘Indians: Texualism, Morality, and the Problem of History’
Terry Castle, ‘Contagious Folly: An Adventure and its Skeptics’ (also in Questions of Evidence a terrific book as well)
and Henry Louis Gates, ‘“Authenticity’, Or The Lesson of Little Tree’
[Later: G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention]
Roland Barthes, Mythologies.
Barthes, Elements of Semiology
Barthes, Image-Music-Text
Along with all the other things I am reading right now, I started Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana books 1 & 2. In the light of what I have read in modern / post-modern hermeneutics, phenomenology, and existentialism, I clearly read Augustine with some non-traditional lenses. For example, folks in Grand Rapids Michigan love to quote Augustine as their source for Calvinistic / western thought.
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition
Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism