MLA 2023 Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory and Our Work Now (Special Session)
Paul Ricoeur insisted there is always more meaning than can be articulated, appropriated, or understood. This session seeks enactments, explorations, and reconsiderations of his Interpretation Theory 50 years later. Though the book was published in 1976, Ricoeur delivered the lectures in fall 1973. It was a period of social and intellectual reckoning similar to our own. Ricoeur had recently relocated to the University of Chicago from Paris-Nanterre under criticism for his attempts to mitigate conflicts during the 1968 student uprisings. In parallel with this personal crisis, Ricoeur was turning in his thought from considerations of symbolic interpretation to considerations of texts and their social and political dimensions.