On the Analysis of Interpretive Language: Part I1

[...] the import of Making Meaning extends well beyond film and literary interpretation into cultural studies, philosophy of language, and the human sciences in general-wherever the key discovery procedure is the act of "interpretation" as opposed to the experimental method of the physical sciences and some branches of the social and behavioral sciences. A critical method (or critical school or mode) would be a set of prescribed techniques and routines through which a text could be seen as a particular sort of allegory, for example, seen as a social myth, cultural ritual, political ideology, historical archetype, religious tenet, personal vision, dream, or self-contained organism (Bordwell 1989b, 369-370, 378-381; Thompson 1988, 3-10, 27-29; for a detailed treatment of some critical methods, see, e.g., Guerin 1992, Bywater 1989).