Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Truth and Method
When we try to understand a text, we do not try to transpose ourselves into the author’s mind but, if one wants to use this terminology, we try to transpose ourselves into the perspectives within which he has formed his views. But this simply means that we try to understand how what he is saying could be right.
Here Gadamer says that understanding a text means understanding it in context. It should be no surprise by now that his main squeeze isn’t the mental life of the author, but the traditions that informed the author’s mental life. Sure, that still involves a wee trip to the past, and Gadamer definitely hasn’t bypassed the person who did the authoring, but he is treating the author as someone influenced by the world in which he or she wrote.
So, for instance, had Gadamer lived to read The Hunger Games, he wouldn’t have been interested so much in the mind of Suzanne Collins when she created Katniss Everdeen, but what she had in mind—what social concerns she wanted to comment on and how the tradition of young adult literature informed her idea of a strong female protagonist—and how those things guided her mind to create that character.
Now let’s get contextual for a minute: like good ole Dilthey, Gadamer proposed that hermeneutics was a general theory of understanding that presupposes the hermeneutic circle and the importance of methodology. Plus, following Heidegger, he moved the focus away from the “who” of the author and toward the “what” in which the author was situated. His concern for the text was how it was an embodiment of tradition, not a door to the psyche of the author.