ABSTRACT. Phenomenology and poetics are two epistemological approaches which aspire, each in its own way, to apprehend reality by getting access to its primary essences. While poetics, from Aristotle to postmodernism, has endeavored to identify the laws according to which literary texts function as such, phenomenology has attempted to describe the processes whereby a conscious subject (re)constructs the deep patterns that support the fabric of the world in its complex manifestations. The present paper concentrates on some of the similarities of the two approaches to meaning and interpretation.

Keywords: poetics; phenomenology; subjectivity; meaning; language