I find it rather hilarious when some from the school of ‘reader-response’ criticism begin to complain about the reviews of their books using the phrase “but that is not what I meant…..”. In essence, they are being self-contradictory, because they are supposed to be the people who think that meaning happens in the encounter and it hasn’t been encoded by the author, and so the author has no right to complain about misunderstanding as he wasn’t making any truth claims or historical claims with words. The cry “I’ve been misunderstood” implies a very different theory of meaning than the one assumed in post-modernism, and a far better one.

Witheringtons Text liefert sehr gute Ansätze für eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Problemen einer post-modernen Hermeneutik!