Frontmatter -- Chapter 1: Writing the Emergence of Hermeneutics -- Chapter 2: Semiotic Interpretation -- Chapter 3: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: The Critical Breakthrough -- Chapter 4: The Parable as Performance: Interpretation, Cultural Transmission, and Political Strategy in Lessing's "Nathan der Weise" -- Chapter 5: Towards a Textual Hermeneutic in the Writing of Johann Gottfried Herder -- Chapter 6: Discourse-Analytical Remarks on Herder’s Concept of Science -- Excursion: Nine Theses on Johann Gottfried Herder -- Chapter 7: The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the German States 1770-1810 -- Chapter 8: Friedrich Schlegel's Hermeneutic Philology and the Eclipse of Aesthetic Culture -- Conclusion: On Incomprehensibility -- Bibliography -- Index