When in European scholarship natural sciences have separated from humanities during the 19th century the concept of hermeneutics won the distinctive mark characterizing the special methods of the humanities in contrast to explanation practiced by natural sciences. The high esteem in literary studies for the individuality of a poet or writer implied that the most important aim of understanding and interpreting was to find the author’s secret intention. Maintaining the results of such research in literary studies necessarily must remain subjective or even ideologically determined made the Russian formalists- later the structuralists from Prague and Western Europe- try to find a more scientific constitution of a poetic text. 

This lecture intends to describe the development of the different methods during the last decades up to the point where you find analysis of “discourse networks” and computer communication in poststructural attitudes but at the same time new ways of hermeneutics taking in consideration the fundamental ambiguity of fictional writing.