The world of interpretations in culture space

Abstract

Text interpretation is essentially a dialogical form of knowledge. The sense of a text exists in reality only within human communication, within a situation of a dialogue. Dialogue turns out to be impossible when its participants only consider the interlocutor's messages through their own usual and limited set of senses, or they try to fully perceive the interlocutor’s way of comprehension by tending to break all links with their sociocultural environment’s normative-valued systems. And only partial digression beyond the limits of the conventional enables us to find common ground for understanding. Therefore, understanding always appears not simply as a dialogue, but as a collision of "the usual" and "the unusual". This process is connected with loosening of well-known ideas, taking phenomena out of their comprehension’s familiar context and destructing the old sense. Understanding starts from the initial point in dialogical movement – a given text requiring understanding as a communicative subject. A movement to the past – past contexts, when it is necessary to understand the text the way the author understood it himself without going beyond this understanding. The solution of this hermeneutic issue is rather difficult and requires the involvement of a huge amount of material. And finally, a movement to the future – prescience, construction of further contexts. Senses "flatten" without such a work of understanding. They transform into knowledge and stop dividing (changing). Every author is a prisoner of his epoch, of his contemporaneity. Subsequent times liberate him from this captivity, and literary studies are called upon to assist this liberation. Hence there is a need for the skills of not only understanding, but also explaining and interpreting texts. When we move from understanding a text to interpreting it, we leave the text in its semantic uniqueness and move into the communicative space of semantic transformations.