The Hermeneutic Advantage Of A Comparative-and-interdisciplinary Approach To The African Novel1

Hermeneutics” implies an enquiry about the meaning of literary works: “what does a literary work mean, and how does it mean?” are its main queries (Sutherland, 2010: 12). Like many other fundamental literary concepts, the word is complex as much as it is crucial; it “is not a word that falls easily from the mouths of most ordinary readers of literature,” to put it in John Sutherland‟s terms (Sutherland, 2010: 12). Nonetheless, hermeneutics being concerned with matters such as “the extraction of meaning from words on the page,” “how exactly the meaning is communicated” and “how, once communicated, we on our side „make sense‟ of it,” I thought it crucial and relevant enough to the subject matter of these study days to place it in my title in spite of its slippery character (Sutherland, 2010: 12). Like all other reading approaches, a comparative-and-interdisciplinary approach to a literary text would have its downsides. Perhaps the main challenge that would face a reader with such an approach is that it calls for greatly varied, demanding and subtle operations. This is what Julia Kristeva‟s definition of “intertextuality,” a term which encapsulates the modern view of the text, and which she is thought to have coined in the 1960s, implies. As she draws attention to the fact that intertextuality is “the condition of any text whatsoever,” considering that “any text is a new tissue of past citations,” Kristeva seems indeed pessimistic when it comes to the feasibility of an efficient disclosure of “the intertext”: “the intertext,” she argues, “is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located;