Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Delight

by Crapanzano, Vincent

• ISBN13: 9780674389816
• ISBN10: 0674389816
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-02-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Textualized Self

Centering

Hermes' Dilemma

The Self, the Third, and Desire

Self-Characterization

The Dialogic Self

Text, Transference, and Indexicality

Talking (about) Psychoanalysis

Mohammed and Dawia

Dialogue

The Experienced Self

Symbols and Symbolizing

Glossing Emotions

Saints, Jnun, and Dreams

Rite of Return

The Submerged Self

Maimed Rites and Wild and Whirling Words Notes

References

Index

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