ONLINE FIRST
published on December 3, 2013
Walter Brogan
James Risser's Contemporary Hermeneutics
The Way-Making Community of Those Who Are Strange
This article is an interpretive analysis of James Risser’s book The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics. I focus on the key elements of Risser’s notion of community and what I call his hermeneutics of the strange and foreign. The article pays particular attention to some of the most important themes in Risser’s book: aesthetics and the flash of beauty; language and the poetic word; the transmission of tradition; the movement of Ruinanz and the circulation of life; weaving. Overall, I attempt to trace the nexus of Plato-Gadamer-Risser in Risser’s text in order to traced the emergence of a contemporary hermeneutics after Gadamer that is developed by Risser in this text.