The need for interpreting arises when a text with which we find ourselves concerned resists immediate absorption into the ongoing stream of our practical life. In this moment of our incomprehension, understanding cannot be coerced by argument or manufactured by method or technique. It occurs when an interpreter finds a responsive word through which the text speaks to us again, so that the varied meanings and force of the text are activated in new and diverse concerns. What word will accomplish this reactivation cannot be predicted or guaranteed. But our capacity to find that word is interpretation’s humane significance and the reason it remains at the heart of literary study.

— Donald Marshall, “Literary Interpretation” (1992)