BOOK REVIEW 99 consists in figuring out the 'mode* not the empirical author, that in the end coincides with the 'intention of the text*. This strategy, admittedly that of the ancient hermeneutic circle, respects the text while making the intentions of the empirical author radically useless. Accordingly Eco draws a distinction between interpreting and using a text. The former involves recognition of and rendering explicit, the strategy of the text given its cultural and lexical background. Using the example of his own much publicized and interpreted novels. The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, Eco shows that the 'witness of the empirical author' appears of interest only in understanding the creative process, that is, 'the story of the growth of textual strategy . .. out of a magmatic territory which has nothing—or not yet—to do with literature.' The private lives and intentions of empirical authors are in certain respects far more unfathomable than their texts. Between the 'mysterious history of textual production' and the 'uncontrollable drift* of its future readings the 'text qua text still represents a comfortable presence, the point to which we stick.' American philosopher Richard Rorty's pragmatic preference dominates his assertion that 'efficacy' rather than 'fidelity' is the point of an interpretation. Impatience with Eco's distinction between interpreting and using texts is evident in his claim that a text has 'just whatever coherence it happened to acquire during the last roll of the hermeneutic wheel', i.e. the particular intentio we happen at the moment to have. Interpretations therefore are no more 'coerced by texts than they are 'imposed' by the economies of our need to persuade ourselves or others. With a characteristically flippant defiance Rorty concludes that "Theory' provides occasion for us to read a lot of first-rate books we might otherwise have missed .. . . What 'theory' has not done is to provide a method of reading.' Jonathan Culler, (comparative literature), rejects this anti-theoretical posture as a denial of 'any public structure of argument' in which a challenge to currently entrenched positions, including Rorty's, could be articulated. Yet he is troubled by Eco's notion of over-interpretation which apparently works against the most interesting forms of modern :riticism. The latter makes explicit 'not what the text has in mind but what it forgets'. Limits to interpretation cannot be identified in advance if the emancipatory edge of the need to 'learn more' is not to be diminished. Christine Brooke-Rose, like Culler from the literary world, continues the focus on interpretation as arena of struggle between authoritarian and emancipatory tendencies. The text is .history palimpsest history—an alternative history of fact and magical recreation 'as convincing as the real story*. Where such a text is set up as the authoritative one, other voices are stifled. But where this discouraged such texts float somewhere between the sacred and the