Project: A book entitled Reading Problems: Making Sense of Difficult Texts. It is a study of several of the modalities of textual difficulties: the hermeticism of Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Mallarmé, the mystifications of Jules Laforgue, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, the Surrealists' obscurity (Eluard, Breton), the repulsive ideology of the writings of the French Collaborators (Paul de Man's wartime journalism) and Derrida's scrambling of literary and philosophical discourses in his writings on Valéry, Ponge and Joyce.   In his essay On Difficulty (1978) George Steiner proposed the following types of difficulties: (1) contingency: rare words, obscure allusions; (2) modal: chronological gaps between the time/place of writing and later/other cultural values (Heidegger, Céline, etc); (3) tactical: aesthetic intention (Mallarmé's desire to give un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu);  (4) ontological: the undermining and/or subversion of the language of ordinary communication (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake).  These categories need to be modified.   From the point of view of the reader's perception, the tactical and ontological types are both simply formal difficulties.   Another type of problem has to be added, i.e., texts that are easy to understand but difficult to interpret because they are too readable, their meaning is obvious or transparent.  There are examples of such poems in the works of Laforgue, Apollinaire, Jacob and Ponge.  Banal texts, i.e., those whose language reproduces that of ordinary communication, have until now suffered from exegetical neglect: they are difficult to interpret since they say what they mean much too directly.  They are the literary equivalent of pop art and can only be discussed metacritically, as cultural signs, representing an aesthetics of banality, as a break with the aesthetics of originality and as a reaction against the revolution in poetic language.  Since their meaning is deliberately obvious, we can only discuss them at the level of their significance, that is in terms of literary semiotics.