Over forty years ago, Jerome Bruner described human cognition äs "an act of invention" (1956:2). It was through invention, through what Bruner saw äs the imposition of order on the otherwise seemingly disordered array of human experience, that the world was made comprehensible. The underlying mechanism for this activity was inference. Since Bruner's time, and over the course of the development of cognitive psychology in general -a development that Bruner himself was to influence so profoundly -the importance of inference has remained a central concern. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and function of inference in the comprehension of literary texts. It will be argued that inferential processing plays a central role in literary Interpretation. It will also be argued that this is a qualitatively different role from the one it plays in the processing of non-literary texts. It will further be contended that a recognition of this difference goes a considerable distance towards revealing how literary texts are processed.Inference cannot be approached in a vacuum, however. It is not a mechanism that Stands alone. Rather, it needs to be situated within a more comprehensive formulation of text processing. While the development of cognitive psychology in the latter half of this Century has produced numerous models of text processing (see, for example, Anderson and Pearson, 1984;
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