Abstract

This study aims to conjoin recent insights in the poetics of the novel with an existential concern for human life. Medina sees his brief, provocative work as a contribution toward establishing "forms of human intending" as bases of literary expression, in the main through his attempt to correlate a hermeneutics of the symbol with the hermeneutics of existence. To this end he first reappraises the act of reflection, finding its most authentic form not in Western philosophical tradition--which, he claims, has tended to see reflection as an almost mechanical operation deriving from insight--but in those forms of writing which present man in the process of reflecting on his own life, its intentions, directions, and misdirections. Here the self is not a given but is shown in the process of being formed; desire for fulfillment of one's path in life, not a detached desire for cognition, is the motive of reflection; and the referential direction of reflection is biographical rather than objective and ideational.