Foreword

Whether one's focus is a text or utterance, a practice or activity, even a building or a landscape, the task of understanding and interpreting is necessarily tied to the concrete situatedness of the interpretive encounter. This is so in two ways: first, because it is the encounter that itself gives rise to the need to understand and interpret (the situation thus draws us into interpretive engagement) and, second, because the very possibility of understanding and interpretation is predicated on that situatedness (the situation thus offers the means by which understanding and interpretation can proceed as well as constraining the manner in which it does proceed). This holds true whether we look to hermeneutics as designating the theory and practice of interpretation as it might apply across a range of "interpretive" disciplines-from art and literature through to politics, cultural studies, and history-or whether we look to hermeneutics, in its transformed Heideggerian sense, as the interpretation of being.