hermeneutics are close to those of the Italian jurist Emilio Betti. On the other hand, his views run largely contrary to the views of Martin Heidegger and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer as well as the views of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley on the "semantic autonomy" of works of literature, as expressed in "The Intentional Fallacy." Hirsch continued to publish on hermeneutics and the concept of authorial intent in the late 1960s and early 1970's, and many of his articles from this period are collected in his second book on hermeneutics, The Aims of Interpretation (1975). Hirsch's views on hermeneutics have been widely cited—Google Scholar lists more than 4,400 citations for Validity in Interpretation—but they have also been widely criticized. Composition and Theory of Writing In the early 1970s Hirsch began working on the theory of writing and composition, publishing several articles and a book, The Philosophy of Composition (1977). The central concept in this book is the idea of "relative readability." One piece of writing is more readable, in terms of relative readability, than another if it conveys the same meaning but is easier to read and is read more quickly than the alternative passage. The Philosophy of Composition was widely reviewed and generated a lot of discussion in composition circles for several years, but Hirsch's work in this area is no longer widely discussed. In the late 1970s, Hirsch and some colleagues at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on relative readability. Participants in the experiments were assigned either a well written passage or a poorly written (stylistically degraded) version of the same passage. Hirsch and his colleagues recorded reading time to determine whether the well written passages were in fact read more quickly, as they predicted they would be. They discovered that they were. However, they also discovered that there was another factor that was even more important than relative readability: if the students lacked crucial background knowledge, they struggled to read both the poorly written and the well written passage. This became particularly clear while Hirsch was running tests at a Virginia community college. The students at the community college did not know who Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were and, as a result, they struggled to make sense of a passage on the U.S. Civil War. Hirsch observed that these students lacked "cultural literacy." They had adequate decoding skills