Texts and Their Interpreters

A LITERARY PHENOMENON can usefully be studied in itself, like one intellectual product among others, and in its specificity.' The nature of literary understanding is inseparable from a hermeneutic effort which, in the following consideration of classical texts, is conceived as a direct critical approach to the text and a direct confrontation of the history of its reception. This is conjoined with more specifically theoretical approaches connected with the structure and formulations of the text, related to experience acquired in the course of working towards an understanding of a text. The classical texts I commonly research pose immediate problems of intelligibility-this is true of Aeschylus, where there is a well-recognized degree of difficulty, but it is also true of Homer, where it has been less well-recognized; letter and meaning cannot be considered in isolation from the process of composition. The gradual discovery of the technical or aesthetic conditions surrounding the writing of the text corresponds to stages in the hermeneutical interpretation of the work, considered as a text not yet understood, accepted in its degree of difference as an example of a genre and as an individual realization of a form. The result could be the same for

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