Abstract
The interest in textuality from a hermeneutic perspective has its historical origins in Martin Luther's doctrine of Sola Scriptura, “Only Scripture”. Schleiermacher, who to liberated hermeneutics from the Bible, presented a scientific account of textuality that consists in establishing a dialectic between the grammatical and the psychological. The modern hermeneutic theory of textuality was first developed by Hans‐Georg Gadamer. To be a work, says Ricoeur, textual discourse must satisfy three criteria: it must be a sequence longer than a sentence; it must be codified into a genre (a story, poem, essay, etc.); and it must be uniquely configured into a style. Ricoeur's analysis of work in this sense is an attempt to synthesize the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher with what he sees as being its antithesis. The hermeneutics of both Ricoeur and Gadamer are returned to their Lutheran origins through this faith in textuality, or textual goodwill.
