A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination

Evan Simpson is a philosophy professor at McMaster University in
Hamilton.

Ricoeur is a philosopher of great range. His work includes studies of
political philosophy, phenomenology, and Freud, as well as the issues in
the philosophy of language addressed here. The subtitle thus takes
precedence over the main title in this collection of his writings on
literary interpretation, metaphor, and narrative.

The 36-page introduction locates Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation
within poststructuralism, which denies that texts have a unique or true
meaning that might be objectively determined. Given this orientation,
conflicts of interpretation are inescapable. However, the basic
poststructuralist view has been developed in divergent ways in
Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.
In contrast to Derrida’s view of radical textual indeterminacy,
Ricoeur stresses the possibility of shared meanings. He holds that
although the task of interpretation is never complete, it can
nonetheless aim at a temporary consensus within a tradition of
commentary.

The selections in this volume consist of articles and interviews from
1970 to 1987, including an essay on Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of
Criticism. They form a generous sample of Ricoeur’s work over this
period and provide materials for a short university-level course on his
ideas about reading and interpretation. Since many of the writings are
fairly technical, the book’s usefulness for the general reader is more
limited.