The discipline of hermeneutics in general, and of literary criticism in particular, is in a state of extraordinary ferment. Ferment is healthy when it calls into question the assumptions that we have never articulated or that we have forgotten we ever made. One’s assumptions perhaps depend ultimately on one’s temperament or even one’s faith, but that is all the more reason for articulating them. In this book I shall try to articulate certain assumptions about literary works and the nature and ends of criticism, and I shall try to see what consequences follow.

My assumptions depend on who I am....

A theory of genre that will produce certainty about the real nature of literary works must await an answer to the question, “How is language possible?” Current theories that treat language “scientifically” in the narrow sense, as an object among other objects, must fail to deal adequately with the consciousness of meaning in the speaking and understanding subject. Precisely where the structuralist enterprise attempts to usurp the task of hermeneutics, as Paul Ricoeur points out, it oversteps its limits as a science.¹ On the other hand, philosophies of language that begin from the thinking subject and postulate a prelinguistic consciousness...

In the preceding chapter, I argued that we can retain the broad genre-concepts as interpretive models, provided that we regard those concepts as reflexive. The concepts themselves are fully interpreted only in the act of interpreting particular works. It follows from the reflexivity of the genre-concepts that the concepts by themselves are insufficient to “prove” that some particular work is a lyric, an epic, or a drama. Wecanshow, given some particular explicit interpretation, that the interpretationunderstandsthe work as lyric, as epic, or as drama. In an important sense, the genre-concepts do not refer to something that...

Adopting any model of literary interpretation plunges one at once into enormously involved philosophical problems. I have provisionally put forward a model on Heideggerian lines. But the model is Heideggerianonlyin that it accepts Heidegger’s crucial notion that interpretation is a making-explicit of what is already grasped (“understood”), but not fully articulated, in our encounters with literary works. What concerns me here is something I have previously mentioned in passing—namely, the fact that a Heideggerian model might seem to lead inevitably to a strict relativism, and, therefore, to the conclusion that knowledge in the human studies is impossible....

It is time to ask how our model can help to articulate interpretations. Our discussion of genre suggested that to read a poem as lyric is to read it as creating a reciprocal relation between mind and world. Such reflections do not by themselves suffice to ground a hermeneutic theory or a program of interpretation. In one sense, the model is hostile to anything that resembles a program, for we have insisted that interpretation is the making-explicit of what is already understood. Insofar as any program of interpretation promises toproduceunderstanding, as opposed to making our understanding more explicit,...