Ricoeur's writings were by far perhaps the 'nicest' theory read yet in this class. Judging from other responses, I'm not the only one to appreciate his deft manuevering around some of the more difficult aspects of hermenuetic thought. Not only is his prose really beautiful at times, but it also proved satisfying in the fact that it does seem to provide a compact interweave of some of the other works we've read, a sort of drawing together. The presentation of the nebulous moment, of the world in front of the text, seems similar to Gadamer's notion of play and the transcendence of the text, while Ricoeur's writing in itself hearkens in the best possible way to whatever grains of enjoyement could be gleaned from Barthes' connotations, while escaping (in my opinion) the Barthesian pretensions to ownership of the text/interpretation.

I especially appreciated what he says about the injunction or intention of the text (page 161) as directing the interpretation, as it provides a realistic and perhaps useful counter to the whiles of pure structuralism or pure reader-response theory or the ever-dreaded new criticism. A good companion to Eco's ideas of the limits of interpretation, the strictures of the text that are nonetheless necessary for any ideas of collective hermenuetics -in order to talk about the text in actual terms.

- Grace