The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions

← Older edit Newer edit →

@@ Line 108: / Line 108: @@
 In the absence of any transparent, extensive, unmediated stylistic or thematic influence by Hemingway on Mailer, my formulation of influence as{{pg|171|172}}
+interpretive and visionary offers a new but specific theoretical reconfiguration of constitutive elements of influence.It provides a key to rendering our incomprehension of Mailer’s literary relationship with Hemingway less so. For me, the interrelated operations of interpreting lived experience, elucidating its epistemology, and putting the whole process through a transformative imagination forms Hemingway’s influence on Mailer. Briefly put: It is a way of making written words by one writer the flesh and blood of aother. It confers magical powers of creativity on the writer as the reader. As a result, on the plane of interpretation, this modality of reading involves the immediate effects of our conscious and unconscious activities of the psyche as thoughts, emotions, dreams and their correlates as myth.
+On the cultural plane, visionary hermeneutic appropriation brings into play the whole range of our familial,social, cultural, and educational inheritance. All of our prejudgments, prejudices, and received notions, as well as our capabilities to create and imagine the world, enter into it. On the side of appropriation of our interpretation, it functions within the psychological structures of sympathetic imagination, identification, projections, and transformations through textual intermediations. In short, it amounts to our vision of the writer’s work. Henceforth, I use the visionary hermeneutic appropriation to indicate the modality of Mailer’s relationship to Hemingway and I shall refer to it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation in the context that I have just formulated it.
+In the interest of taking just a step further the concept of the visionary in hermeneutic appropriation, I wish to emphasize how it plays in the theoretical concept. By visionary, I mean to point out a kind of unconscious intervention that renders our imagination active, making it capable of audacious undertakings. Additionally, I would attribute to a quality of inspiration, a work of animation more akin to its Latin etymology of “to inspire” (''insp r re'') or to “breathe upon” or “breathe into.” It seeks to enliven, quicken, and heighten the senses. Inspiration as such coincides with ''pneuma'' in its etymological Greek meaning as “breath,” which approximates its quasitheological meaning as “vital spirit.”
+If we integrate visionary hermeneutic appropriation within its twin phenomenological appearance in our consciousness and its existential implications in our experience, the term would then impart a sense of imaginative apprehension and alignment. This is so because one may perceive it as a type of conversion that would be justifiable. As conversion, it carries in it a{{pg|172|173}}
 === Notes ===