both precedes and follows poetics’ (Todorov, Introduction to Poetics, 7). Poetics is useless in isolation; knowing the compositional rules of a text is of use only if we want to read the text. The contribution of poetics is to be found, in the words of Jonathan Culler, in its ‘attempt to specify how we go about making sense of texts, what are the interpretive operations on which literature itself, as an institution, is based’ (Structuralist Poetics, viii). In simpler words, poetics makes us aware