ABSTRACT
A powerful interpretive act-in this instance, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, by William Rothman'-is usually understood as telling us something about its subject matter; but it can also be interrogated (as will be the case here) for what it can tell us about interpretation as such, the latter's conditions of possibility, what an interpretation has to leave out to include what it finally manages to include, and also what all this has to do with the way in which the interpretive operation constitutes a certain object of study, and a certain (institutionalizable) "field" of study: something I am bound to see a little differently since I am peering over into it from my own (whose "object" is verbal narrative). So I have no vested interest in this particular field, whose products I nonetheless sometimes read with a certain envy, as though it were easier to be a materialist when you had a "really" material object to work with .
