Paul Ricoeur Literature Hermeneutics Fragility

Paul Ricoeur, French thinker, gives priority to the text itself in his literary hermeneutics and is categorized in the text-centered group. He puts forward this key question in his theory if a literary text has semantic autonomy. He believes that the text has semantic autonomy based on three dimensions of 1) Author’s intention ,2) Primary reader and 3) Social-historical circumstances of the text production. According to this interpretation, the text is an array of words having meaning and the consciousness and intent of author and it’s socialhistorical conditions haven’t any role in formation of it’s meaning. It should be mentioned that there has been too controversies over this matter, that is, semantic autonomy of text, that each of controversies has noted to special dimension of it. One of these controversies is the subject of this essay, that is going to see to Paul Ricoeur’s literary and text-centered hermeneutics from the view of it’s function for interpretation of political novel. Therefore, in this essay, the existing political concepts in the political novel are important. The concepts like power, authority, and etc, that can make Ricoeur’s text model fragile, because Ricoeur’s work doesn’t provide a framework for interpretation of the political texts, in general, and political novel, in particular, by virtue of it’s focus over semantic conditions (Autonomy of the text from author and it’s social-historical circumstances).