Interpreting Interpretation

Somewhere between Richard Rorty's liberal ironist, for whom discipline dissolves, and E. D. Hirsch's culturally literate student, fed a fixed diet of facts and values, William E. Rogers looks for a better account of what literary education is for. He finds it in the semiotics of C. S. Peirce, building the idea of an interpretive system and turning textual hermeneutics back on interpretation itself, so that the world comes to look like a text.

Readings of Robert Frost and John Ashbery show the method at work, and the argument closes as a Peircean answer to the pragmatism of Dewey and Rorty: the humanities teach not texts but ways of interpreting them. A demanding, carefully reasoned book for teachers of literature and students of theory who feel the pull of postmodern doubt but still believe reading can be a discipline.