Literary Hermeneutics For What Reason and for What Purpose Does One Engage in Literary Interpretation?

Starting off from a reading of the beginning of Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks, this article is dedicated to the question of why and to what purpose literary texts have a particular affinity with interpretations. A critical discussion of Jurij M. Lotman's theory of literature and the so called aesthetics of reception leads to a different assumption why literary texts need a specific hermeneutic approach. It is based on a principle that underlies all linguistic communication and according to which utterances are generally considered to be coherent and meaningful. In the case of fictional discourse this principle is extended as, here, it applies also to the objects of the text, to the things, persons and events it is referring to. As these phenomena don't exist independently form the text, but only within the act of communication established by the text, the question of their meaning is raised and they, therefore, become subject to interpretation. In a final reading of the beginning of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary the theoretical approach developed in this article is reviewed by a concrete example