Ricoeur ascribes a spiraling forward momentum to the interpretive process. Like other post-structuralist thinkers, he insists that no moment or understanding is definitive. Indeed, as John Arthos explains in Hermeneutics After Ricoeur (2019), his theory is grounded in the inevitability of misreadings, the difficulties of actualizing meanings across temporal and cultural distance, and the existential problem of the subject’s “tragic finitude” (120). Even so, unlike other thinkers at the time, Ricoeur approaches these limits as markers of abundance, as signals that there is “always a surplus of meaning which goes beyond the linguistic sign” (IT 45). As Johann Michel observes in Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists (2015), this commitment to abundance distinguishes his hermeneutics from the critical approaches articulated by Pierre Bordieu, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others.

Rita Felski identifies Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of trust” as a touchstone for emerging post-critical methods of reading (The Limits of Critique, 2015). Scholars working in Felski’s vein have explored a range of approaches. Recent examples include Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking (2019), which argues for the transformative potential of empathic reading; Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being (2021), which supplements theoretical readings of Black literature through renewed consideration of everyday experience; and Ada Smailbegoviç’s Poetics of Liveliness (2021), which examines the meaningfulness of poetic materials and materiality.

Despite this flourishing, Ricoeur continues to receive limited attention in literary study. Currently, his thinking plays a much larger role for researchers in the social and applied sciences. This session invites attendees to consider how Ricoeur’s interpretation theory might help us respond to MLA President Christopher Newfield’s call to “use our established and evolving expertise to reconstruct our profession for the sake of our everyday labor—and for the transformative things we each envision.” The panelists assess Ricoeur’s interpretive model in three distinct contexts and hope for active discussion with attendees.

The session begins with Cristina Viana’s “Ricoeur and Communication: What about the ‘Hors du Discours’?” A philosopher by training, Viana explores Ricoeur’s overlapping conceptions of spoken and textual exchange and compares his 1973 lectures on interpretation theory with others on aural communication delivered two years earlier. The paper foregrounds questions that remain vital for literary study today: How and why do we communicate? Why is misunderstanding inevitable? Why aren’t our efforts to reach mutual understandings sufficient to de-escalate conflict and promote well-being? Viana considers these questions in light of the surplus Ricoeur argues emerges and persists in the relation between the event of speech and the meaning of what is spoken.

Next, Sania Hashmi explores how Ricoeur’s interpretation theory can shed useful light in another context, the omnitemporality of meaning in Virginia Woolf’s well-studied novel Mrs. Dalloway. Titled “Fact, Fiction, and the Recesses of Our Minds,” Hashmi’s paper analyzes critical discourse around the characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith and uses Ricoeur’s hopeful description of the interplay of intuiting and articulating meaning to explore Woolf’s metaphorical exploration of the hinge between life and death. By enacting Ricoeur’s theory in these ways, Hashmi proposes a new interpretation that links entries from Woolf’s diary, scenes from Mrs. Dalloway, and recent explorations of the novel’s capacity to re-engage us in the art of living in the midst of collective suffering.

To conclude and prompt discussion, Nate Mickelson reconsiders the session’s opening questions through photographer Moyra Davey’s insistence that reading is an artistic act. In his paper “Scarcity and Abundance in Moyra Davey’s The Problem of Reading,” Mickelson analyzes the artist’s choice to intersperse photographs of overfull bookshelves and dusty surfaces with prose reflections on the “frantic feeling” of choosing what to read and the “state of grace and bliss” reading sometimes produces (7, 12). He observes that Davey’s aesthetic reading enacts Ricoeur’s dialectic of understanding and explanation and argues that her photographs of dust–material typically ignored, regretted, or swept away–reinforce the abundant possibilities of refusing singular, scarce, or fixed textual meanings.