Hermeneutic Circle and its Contribution to Literary Studies, Text Comprehension and Text Criticism

Hermeneutics – either regarded as science, art, methodology or skill – has a great influence, in our time, on various areas of human knowledge due to its long history and development.
Hermeneutics has gone through several stages and has followed different tendencies, but in all these, the focal point has been the reader's "understanding" of the text. The structural feature of "understanding" is considered to be its circularity, known as "hermeneutic circle". "Understanding" is, by nature, referential and cyclical, because in order to know the whole, one is to know the constituents of the whole, as well as the constant interrelation of the parts and the whole. This cyclical movement is dynamic and adaptable; therefore, far from being a vicious circle, it suggests countless possibilities for reading, interpreting and comprehending the texts and possesses the capacity of opening a dialogue with all the linguistic insights, literary theories and philosophical schools.
This paper, apart from carrying out a general review on various trends in hermeneutics, introduces the different interpretations of hermeneutic circle, its historical background and the ways and areas of its application.