For Sigurd Burckhardt, literary interpretation began with the discovery of an "inconsistency" in a text. Minimizing the possibility that the writer has "unconsciously" fallen into an inconsistency in the use of material, the true interpreter, Burckhardt believes, abandons a tendency to "correct" the writer and seeks instead a new formulation by which the inconsistency can be seen as a part of a work's essential unity. "Whether I search for the meaning of a word or for the meaning of my life," he wrote, "I am looking for something under which I can subsume the otherwise unrelated and...
For Sigurd Burckhardt, literary interpretation began with the discovery of an "inconsistency" in a text. Minimizing the possibility that the writer ha...
