Glossary of Terms: ENG 220WE
Verbal Sense versus Significance
- Hirsch's translation and appropriation of Sinn vs Bedeutung.
Verbal sense (Sinn) is intrinsic, rooted in an analysis of the
text itself. Significance (Bedeutung) denotes any use of the
work to illustrate something else: history, psycholanalysis,
Marxist political theory, an individual reader's life as mirrored
in the text, etc. For Hirsch, hermeneutic certainty resides only
in analyzing verbal sense
Hermeneutics and the Hermeneutic Circle