At Last: “Analyses” and “Interpretations”: Are They Complementary?

In 1986, while still at Harvard, I started teaching summer school at the Bread Loaf School of English, the graduate program in English of Middlebury College. Bread Loaf offers courses in literature, theater, and writing—where I fit in. I came to that job with a background in applied linguistics and cognitive development, but not in literature, and so started out feeling professionally marginal. But appropriation of interests and understandings from repeated participation in a powerful environment has its effects, and I’m now increasingly intrigued by differences in perspectives on texts between language research and the humanities. This is my first attempt to consider them together.