"Poetry as Praxis: The Hermeneutical Circle of Allen Tate and Paul Ricoeur"

Abstract

Perennially known as a “New Critic,” Allen Tate actually foresaw the looming revolution in critical theory in essays like “Literature as Knowledge” and “The Hovering Fly.” Born from themes evident in some of his earliest work, the criticism of semiotic theory in those essays anticipates Derrida and the deconstructionists and closely parallels the hermeneutic phenomenology devised by Paul Ricoeur in <i>Freedom and Nature</i>, <i>Fallible Man</i>, <i>The Rule of Metaphor</i>, and his later essay “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation.” Both critics, a generation apart, describe the “hermeneutical circle,” and both regard poetry as the optimal realization of the circle’s living, productive function in the achievement of objectivity and understanding.