Interpretations of Cultural Expressions (826163B6)
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Tilburg University (UVT)
This document is a summary of all the articles for the course Interpretation of Cultural Expressions, year 1 of Online Culture at Tilburg University including a conceptual toolbox at the final page
Interpretations of Cultural Expressions (826163B6)
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Interpretation of Cultural Expressions
Index
Hermeneutics – J. Zimmerman (2015) Chapter 1 + 4......................................................................................................2
A short introduction: hermeneutics – Jens Zimmerman (video).....................................................................................6
A Theory of Narrative in Culture – L. Herman & B. Vervaeck (2017)...............................................................................6
If this is a man – Primo Levi (1959)..................................................................................................................................8
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive – Giorgio Agamben (1999) Chapter 1: The Witness...................9
Company (1989) – Samuel Beckett................................................................................................................................10
Video: Literature – Samuel Beckett...............................................................................................................................10
Nordic Noir – Location, Identity and Emotion (2016) – G. Agger...................................................................................10
Bend It Like Beckham: Dribbling the Self Through a Cross-Cultural Space (2010) – M.A. Chacko.................................12
“Fun Fun Fun on the Autobahn”: Kraftwerk Challenging Germanness (2014) – M. Schiller..........................................13
What’s Love Got to Do With It? Sex and the City’s Comic Perspective on Sex (2014) – B. Oria.....................................14
Understanding Music – R. Scruton (2009) Chapter 3: Wittgenstein on Music...............................................................15
Understanding Music – R. Scruton (2009) Chapter 4: Movement.................................................................................16
Musicking. The Meanings of Performing and Listening – C. Small (1998) Prelude: Music and Musicking.....................16
Handbook of Music and Emotion – S. Davies (2012) Chapter 2: Emotions Expressed and Aroused by Music..............17
What Is Sociological about Music? – W. Roy & J. Dowd (2010).....................................................................................20
Conceptual toolbox.......................................................................................................................................................23
,Hermeneutics – J. Zimmerman (2015) Chapter 1 + 4
Main question: What is hermeneutic interpretation?
Chapter 1: What is hermeneutics?
Hermeneutics = interpretation with the goal to make sense of a text/situation (to understand what they mean).
The art of understanding
‘reading’ a red light means stopping the car
Engaging in hermeneutics is whenever one tries to grasp the meaning of something (eg. conversation,
article).
Understanding something goes beyond knowledge = passing/receiving of information.
o Understanding is knowledge in the deeper sense of grasping not just facts but their integration into a
meaningful whole. Interpreting words is based on personal life experience and cultural
understanding of property.
The word ‘hermeneutics’ stems from the ancient Greek language.
o Plato + Aristotle
o Hermes: interpretation involves both receiving a message and sending a message.
o Heidegger: interpretation is motivated by personal interest and concern.
Contradiction:
In Greek antiquity, hermeneutics aimed to discover the truth about ourselves and the world we inhabit for
the sake of wisdom. The ancient world considered philosophy, religion and poetry as important carriers of
moral ideals.
In modern society, we incline to discount philosophy, religion and poetry as sources of real knowledge.
Hermeneutics (2nd definition) = a philosophical discipline concerned with analyzing the conditions of understanding.
Eg. how language, cultural traditions and our nature as historical beings make understanding possible.
Truth and Method (1960) by Gadamer as the start of its own discipline.
Philosophical hermeneutics is not a theory of knowledge.
Hermeneutics examines and describes what happens when understanding of any kind takes place.
What is understanding?
Understanding = the interpretive act of integrating particular things such as words, signs and events into a
meaningful whole.
We understand an object/word/fact when it makes sense within our own life context and thus speaks to us
meaningfully. When we understand objects/texts/situations in this way, they become part of our inner
mental world so that we can express them again in our own terms.
Hermeneutic thinkers believe that in most cases understanding as this kind of integration happens
unconsciously, because we already move in a familiar cultural environment within which we perceive
words/objects in a pre-established context of meaning.
Contradiction:
Our modern culture tends to think that real knowledge consists in quantification (in the scientific numerical
description of things in the world). On this account, objective truth requires an impersonal, theoretical
stance toward things.
Hermeneutic philosophers contend that our primary mode of perception is not theoretical but practical and
depends on our current desires or interests.
Hermeneutic philosophers argue that interpretation is not only something we do, but also something we are.
Interpretation is our fundamental way of being in the world. All understanding is a matter of interpretation and
interpretation is essentially the personal integration of objects/words into a meaningful whole. Meaningful
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, knowledge and communication require more than mere information exchange and cannot be mastered by mere
technique.
The 3 central claims of hermeneutics:
1. The nature of consciousness
2. The nature of truth
3. The importance of language
Hermeneutic philosophers believe that in each of these vital areas of our experience, key developments in
modern thought and culture have brought about a distorted view of who we are and how we arrive at
knowledge.
1. The nature of consciousness
Hermeneutic thinkers claim that our modern consciousness has been shaped in such a way that we imagine
ourselves as islands of awareness floating in the grand ocean of life, disconnected from other selves. We tend to
think of the mind as something separated from the outside material world and we reach out to make contact with
others and with the world around us. We are individual subjects confronted by external objects, such as nature or
other people.
Disengaged self (Charles Taylor): outside influences are admitted only by conscious choice.
Engaged self (hermeneutic thinkers): consciousness itself is shaped by the way in which we inhabit the
world, our ‘self’ is fundamentally connected to the world and to other people.
The universal human experiences birth, death, hunger and the need for shelter already determine how we see the
world and undergird the formation of every particular culture. Culture, language and upbringing shape our attitudes
long before we make conscious decisions.
2. The nature of truth
Contradiction:
Our view of consciousness naturally informs our understanding of truth and how to obtain it science.
Hermeneutic thinkers believe that we have falsely elevated this scientific ideal of knowledge, allowing it to
become the measure of all human knowledge. They argue that we only conduct experiments and want to
know about the world because we are already deeply involved in it at the level of everyday, practical activity.
Without this prior experiential relation to things, scientific results would be meaningless.
For hermeneutics, knowledge is more than naming and describing objects; it involves understanding meaningful
structures we already participate in. Hermeneutic thinkers insist that we need to redefine objective truth as
something we take part in rather than something we merely observe from a distance. We don’t make truth happen,
rather truth is something that happens to us.
3. The importance of language
Contradiction:
For disengaged-self people, language is like a toolbox of labels we attach to things in order to handle them.
Words and the ideas expressed through them are instruments that help us communicate our needs and
allow us to describe and control our world. Perception and language are kept apart.
Hermeneutic thinkers deny that we can have a meaningful experience without understanding pain (hurting
tooth) or temperature (burned finger) first within a cultural vocabulary by which we make sense of things.
Different languages explain the same sense experience differently. The language we use already interprets
for us a certain way in which we relate to sense experience and how we express it to others. The naked truth
does not exist.
Pre-understanding (hermeneutics) = the symbolic universe into which we are inducted from childhood on provides
pre-understanding of the things we interpret.
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