Cyrus Hamlin, Hermeneutics of Form: Romantic Poetics in Theory and Practice. New Haven: Schwab, 1998; 441 pp.; ISBN 0939681056 (pbk.); LC call no.: PN1261.H36


Cyrus Hamlin's Hermeneutics of Form is an original, honest, and challenging work. The volume brings together nine essays written between 1971 and 1983 when Hamlin, now at Yale, taught at the University of Toronto and was instrumentally involved in developing its comparative literature program. All the essays are newly revised for this publication, and a new preface introduces their central theme by "reading" Caspar David Friedrich's painting Chalk Cliffs of Rügen as a self-reflective experience, in which we as viewers recognize the similarity between ourselves and the gazing figures we are gazing at.

Hermeneutics of Form makes a powerful claim for the purpose of criticism as "a dialogue with tradition through the hermeneutic encounter with texts" (42). Hamlin puts this claim into action by weaving his way among critiques of various critical schools, close readings of texts from the Bible to James Joyce, and reflections on classic issues in literary theory including metaphor, Romantic irony, and the identity of the literary text. In the process, he presents in both theory and practice an approach to literature that is derived from the primarily German hermeneutical tradition. Hamlin's notion of hermeneutics centres on a necessary dialogue between the text and the individual reader by which the reader can ideally recreate the text for his or her own time, sharing in a sense of community with the literary work but also with a new community of readers shaped by the experience of reading. The ideal character of this experience, however, is substantially qualified by a negativity at the heart of the reading experience. This negativity takes various forms, from the author's sense of the limitations of his or her language to the reader's awareness that there are limits to complete understanding; the hermeneutics of reading is, in fact, unavoidably shaped by interruptive experiences of reversal, limitation, reconstruction, self-reflection, and difference. "The moments of deepest insight in poetry," Hamlin thus laments, "are totally incompatible with the cognitive and reflective procedures of self-knowledge," so that the most profound experience of a text paradoxically "emphasizes that which is not" (125, 121). Poetic form is both a mark of this fundamental negativity and an attempt to overcome it. Form, in Hamlin's readings, emerges as the quality of a work that allows a writer to transcend subjectivity by gaining access to an intersubjective norm of ethical values. By the same token, however, form sets limits to the possibility of communicating individual experience.

Hamlin's readings range widely within the Western canon to encompass Platonic dialogue, Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, the poetry of Donne, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy. But the main focus is on German and English Romanticism--Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats. Two writers above all dominate the lines of thought in this book: Hölderlin and Hegel, whose texts make their way into virtually every one of the essays. Key concepts that derive, explicitly or implicitly, from Hegel include negativity, mediation, reversal, the dialectical structure of thought, the dialogic character of aesthetic experience, and the emphatically recurring refrain "for us," which Hamlin borrows from Hegel's philosophical prose and uses to concentrate his own interpretive effort on the reading experience and the reader's subjectivity. Above all, the Hegelian notion of negativity as "the negation of the negative" emerges as crucial. In Hamlin's hermeneutic context, it refers to the way we negate the inherent negativities of language (such as the discontinuous relationship between sign and referent) in a reconstructive process of interpretation -"by positing, or constructing, the meaning of the text through a dialogical interaction" that takes place in the act of reading (204).

The concept of performance is also significant here, as a sense of the way the language and form of literary texts participate in the attempted act of communication between poet and reader. At the same time, Hamlin's own criticism is "performative" inasmuch as his methodology is of a piece with his observations. His theory and practice, which probe the dialogic nature of the text, often by examining that text's origins in dialogic interchanges among (for instance) Schiller, Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling, also derive from Hamlin's own dialogic exchanges with colleagues and critics, among them Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, Paul Ricoeur, Northrop Frye, I. A. Richards, René Wellek, and a generation of Comparative Literature students at Toronto. With its commitment to a theory of hermeneutics as mental and spiritual response, carried out in through implicit and explicit acts of dialogue, the book also affirms the value of humanistic education in general, and of comparative literature in particular. The role of literature in university departments of language study often provides the rationale for Hamlin's focus on a theory of interpretation, inasmuch as all education involves communication through language. This concern also lies behind his definition of hermeneutics as "preeminently a branch of practical philosophy... which addresses issues of reading and understanding in ways that reaffirm the central place of literature in education" (31). Intensely philosophical and reflective, but at the same time pedagogically engaged and communicative, Hermeneutics of Form is urgent reading for both Romantic specialists and students and scholars of Comparative Literature.



Angela Esterhammer

University of Western Ontario