| Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, published in 1960, has influenced both the natural sciences and the humanities and continues to stand as one of the most important works affecting twentieth-century philosophic thought and scholarship. Gadamer's work influences not only psychology, philosophy, theology, history, and law, but it also reaches art and literary theory, and this paper apples Gadamer's ideas of hermeneutical consciousness to women's drama. The present study focuses on how Gadamer's hermeneutical concepts incorporate the ontology of play, the art of questioning, and the speculative openness of language--all essential elements of Bildung and Dasein--within the feminist theatre of Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Caryl Churchill so that we obtain not merely a feminist reading of three works but more aptly a humanist understanding. Specifically, this thesis analyzes how the characters within the works struggle to achieve hermeneutical consciousness. |
