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The Experience of Language Isness How close does the experience of language let reading get? How close is close reading? Taking close reading as its point of departure, this chapter will then widen its focus in order to consider the experience of language with some reference to art, interpretation, and what we are now accustomed to calling archi-writing. This last will also be called telescripture, written in the lower case, so that through its first and second syllables, derived not from “telos,” end, but from “tēle,” distant, far, and through the allusion to uppercase (Holy) Scripture which its third and fourth syllables make, we do not underestimate the theological and religious depths and heights to which its forces reach. What are the principles of close reading? Principles are practical or methodological and theoretical or logical. The principles of close reading are either rules for doing close reading or the conditions of the possibility of close reading. If the methodological rules are going to be good guides for conducting close reading, our formulation of those rules had better be guided by our knowledge of the logical foundations. But do close reading and interpretation more generally have any logical foundations? THREE 50 | PHENOMENOLOGY OF LANGUAGE In its technical sense the expression “close reading” is chiefly used of literary texts and of the approach to them advocated by the school of New Criticism active mainly in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States, as well as in Great Britain. Based on the title of John Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941), the label New Criticism is applied to the disparate family of poets and critics that includes Ransom himself, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley. These writers recognized an affiliation with what was being performed at Cambridge, England, by I. A. Richards under the name of practical criticism, the title of the book he had published in 1924. A key idea shared by these authors, along with F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, is that a text, whether it be a poem, a play, or a novel, is to be read independently of its social, biographical, and historical context. What matters primarily are “the words on the page.” The author’s intentions and the affect or other effect the words have on the reader are irrelevant to the work as a work of art. What the work asks for is a close reading of the text in itself and of the more or less complex internal interrelationships of its parts. Like the well-wrought urn of Donne’s poem “The Canonization” and of the title of the study by Cleanth Brooks, what is paramount is the ontology of the work. The business of the text is its isness. Hence the slogan that “a poem should not mean, but be.” The paradigm of the work of art is the poem. Frank Kermode will say later that “the image is” and that “Poetry, by virtue of the image is.”1 (We shall come back to images below.) Kermode goes on to say that “prose merely describes.” For the New Critical close reader, for whom the paradigm of the work of literature is the poem, even if the work is written in prose, paraphrase is a heresy and what is called a translation is at best a new work of art. What can close reading thus described have to do with the study of Holy Scripture? It may seem that it poses a threat. For if paraphrase is a heresy according to New Criticism, is this not because New Criticism is a heresy according to Scripture, namely the heresy of idolatry? In his review of New Criticism in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye speaks with some justification of the “vaguely sacramental” character of the movement, of its members belonging to an élite “ritual masonic” “mandarin caste,” a revival of the movement that preached art for the sake of art.2 How can it be possible, therefore, for Lyle M. Eslinger to write a book titled Kingship of God in Crisis, give it the subtitle A Close Reading of 1 Samuel 1–12, and tell his readers that he means the words “Close Reading” to be understood in the way intended by New Criticism?3 One response to this question would be to say that the biblical text is literature in the sense of letters in the sense that there are two letters...

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