ABSTRACT
Debates concerning methodological issues in literary interpretation may not be at the forefront of current thinking in literary studies, but if this is so it is by no means because the issues have been satisfactorily resolved. They clearly have not. None the less, there seems to be a majority view, whether it is based on assumptions built into various forms of neopragmatist reader-response criticism, deconstructionist criticism, or a criticism influenced by philosophical hermeneutics, that literary texts are open to innumerable different interpretations and that anything like a reasonably strict methodology for interpretation as envisaged, for example, by E.D.Hirsch in his Validity in Interpretation in the late sixties, is perhaps neither possible nor desirable.
