The starting point of this study is a review of the classical problem of meaning in order to bring to light the relative cognitive and ontological positions taken on this issue by semioticians and hermeneuticians, with some assistance from philosophy and experimental physics.¹ It will be noted that meaning in poetry and the hermeneutic position are privileged, and this is so because of my own research, but my objective is to shed some light on postmodern thinking and the place of both semiotics and hermeneutics in it.

The major significance of semiotics in literary criticism in post–World War years...

Parody is a limit case for hermeneutic enquiry because the play of model and text creates distorted truth-claims and indeterminate poetry develops an unstable response range, but literature of appropriation and identification, both personal and collective, is much more problematic, for the limits between reader and text tend to dissolve. The hermeneutic approach to texts of appropriation and identification is to probe directly into the relation these texts have with personal identity. This is the overriding direction this chapter and the two that follow take. The probe into identity through the hermeneutics of making sense asks three questions: (1) What...

Hermeneutics from its inception in the eighteenth century has been concerned with the meaning we ascribe to texts. My task here is to examine what it is that we mean when we say that a poetic text means this or really means something else, etc. In this book, I take up neither the history of the meaning of meaning in hermeneutics nor the status of meaning in the approaches of the two other major contemporary theories, semiotics and deconstruction. My point is that the meaning of poetic meaning in hermeneutics today is a nonlinear equation; it is a description of...

In historical terms postmodernism begins in the second half of the twentieth century in Western Europe and the Americas, and somewhat later in Africa and Asia. The term encompasses aesthetic, cultural, and political considerations of some magnitude. This has been a period of reflection on the established paradigms in all realms of human endeavour, which by the end of the century will have effected an irreversible rupture with modernism.¹ Postmodernism is a fundamental cultural rejection of a master narrative, a denial of validity to a centred world-view.

Perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of postmodernism is to be found in the...