code into the critical text. Poetics includes all the methods of examining
those complex conventions and procedures by which the author syn-
thesizes through composition and the reader synthesizes through per-
formance the various elements of the text. Hermeneutics includes all
the methods by which the reader analyzes the text into its elements
and construes their meanings. As is the case with many another disci-
pline, poetic and hermeneutic theory are after-the-fact elaborations of
method. As students and teachers of literature, we have learned to
practice both skills but tend, consciously or not, to favor one method of
engagement (poetic or hermeneutic), justifying this preference usually
by borrowing a theory from some methodologically cognate discipline.

Though we are trained to approach a text from either of these two
vantage points, it is no secret which of these has the more visible halo of
respectability. We have only to examine the terms we use when we
currently speak of literary study. "Criticism," "critical theory," and
"literary theory" -- such terms, left undefined, obscure the method-
ological bases of these enterprises. "Criticism," whether evaluative or
explicative, generally implies the hermeneutical approach -- the objec-
tification, though not necessarily the reification, of texts. "Critical the-
ory," accordingly, is the attempt to ground hermeneutic activity in a
particular set of principles. "Literary theory," the vaguest of all these
terms, is applied loosely both to hermeneutics and to poetics, but, since
the overwhelming majority of articles and monographs that currently
call what they do "literary theory" propose or justify or critique the
principles by which decoded texts may be recoded, this term has come
to mean "hermeneutical theory."

There are many historical reasons for the present dominance of
hermeneutics (including the "negative hermeneutics" of deconstruc-
tion) and for its virtual subsuming of the discipline of poetics. These
would include the tradition of Greco-Roman rhetorical pedagogy,
which has always used literary texts as analyzable models, and that of
Judeo-Christian exegesis, which has treated biblical texts as coded
messages. Another, perhaps not unrelated, factor has been the absence
of a clear functional distinction between poetic reading and hermeneutical
reading. Of course it would be a help if these two adjectival terms were
properly differentiated, but the greater problems lies in the ambiguity
of that common term "reading," an ambiguity that we might usefully
begin to examine by choosing as our angle of inquiry that technically
more denotative term "interpretation." How do we and how should we
interpret "interpret?" The preliminary questions I will raise here are,
as they say, "matters of semantics," but every collective enterprise since
Babel has had to ask itself from time to time if it knew what it really
meant by the words it used. The two terms that we need to interrogate

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