A HERMENEUTICS OF MYTH AND SYMBOL: A THEORETICAL PARADIGM FOR AMERICAN STUDIES

This study presents a new understanding of an approach to the study of culture that characterized the first body of American Studies scholarship, myth-symbol criticism. Although empiricist critics have argued that myth-symbol criticism is theoretically bankrupt, they have treated it neither as a coherent body of scholarship defined by shared categories of interpretation nor as a form of textual interpretation that developed out of literary criticism and theory. After correcting these omissions, a theoretical understanding of myth-symbol criticism may be reached by looking at the problems posed by the myth-symbol critics' use of the terms "myth" and "culture," and, most importantly, at their implicit questioning of empiricist epistemology.;It has been argued that this sort of cultural hermeneutics ignores the ideological function of language and other cultural products, and that what is needed is a critique of ideology that can lead to knowledge of social domination, and thus to emancipation. This position fails to take into account the limits of human understanding that result from cultural, historical, and personal differences. On the other hand, American Studies myth-symbol criticism and other forms of cultural interpretation often fail to evaluate the idealizations they seek to understand. Critique of ideology is a necessary to correct this omission, but it is a subsidiary moment of cultural hermeneutics. Because there are as many "critiques" as there are perspectives, American Studies needs to include a variety of interpretive approaches.;Empiricism has pictured the formation of legitimate knowledge as occurring through the passive perception of "facts" which are supposed to exist, like rocks or trees, independently of the perceiver. A more adequate account describes knowledge as resulting from interpretive acts, or "constitutions," of which facts are only one variety. Knowing makes use of other constitutions, two of which are myth and symbol. One kind of knowing, textual interpretation, is understood as an act of definition by which the interpreter claims a meaning for an artifact by reference to a context. The text is like a theoretical model in the sciences in that its isomorphism with social reality is construed variously by different interpreters and does not exist prior to interpretation. The goal of interpretation is not to establish the correct meaning of the text, but to understand the text in a way that is a useful reflection of the referent. Culture is understood as a set of models available to a group.