<p>This essay represents a measured, reflective engagement with the thought processes involved in critically analysing a literary text, and with what a close and careful reading of it reveals about the nature of signs, problems of referentiality, and complexities of interpretation. Through a series of original re-readings of “The Sphinx,” a tale by Poe set during a cholera epidemic, it examines the interpretative problems posed by the text”s language—in the relations between epigraphs; the semiotics of riddles and omens; the historiographical conceit of a shifting <i>episteme</i>; and the shaping of realities by the logic of simulacra, rhetorical devices, recursivity, and a “metaphysics of presence” which continue to inform contemporary classifications and understandings of illness, and the sense of subversiveness associated with “deconstruction.” The essay’s reflections on method and meaning explore the nature of “literariness” and the relation between reader and text, focusing on how theory, embedded within the reading process, emerges from textual specificities, and forms the fundamental ground of criticism and critical thinking.</p>