From a Philological and Philosophical Perspective

Abstract

Forum: Close Reading Any interpretation or analysis of a text or an image, of a map, or a constellation of stars requires full attention to the details in order to reach a maximum understanding of what is presented to us, whether we consider, for example, a fifteenth-century poem by Oswald von Wolkenstein or a novel by the Nobel Prize winner Herta Muller. If we do not first gain a comprehensive knowledge of the meaning of every word, the individual phrases, sentence components, and then of the complete text, we hardly can venture into the critical examination. No interpretation will be solidly built, whether from a Marxist, Feminist, Structuralist angle, or drawing on the history of mentality, without that condition being met as postulated by New, and in this regard actually Old, Criticism. We can easily fail to perceive the important messages of a text if we do not grasp, for instance, dialect variations, jargons, metaphorical expressions, but then also the meter, rhyme, and tonality of the language used, not to forget style, idiosyncratic expressions, idiomatic phrases, etc. Every text that enters an aesthetic framework is built on a highly sophisticated structure, and without knowing all the nuts and bolts, we won't have a chance to penetrate deeper into its fundamental content and essence. To make a comparison, I cannot venture into analyzing the spiritual meaning of a Gothic cathedral if I do not have the virtual blueprint in front of me. As a matter of fact, every foreign language teacher, that is, every teacher, for instance, lays the foundation for the task at hand, a close reading, which grows over time and should get closer and closer to the core of the matter as a natural progression. In that process, however, something surprising happens we are all familiar with. Since the earliest Biblical times, and throughout the ages until today, reading has been a medium for uncovering the many different levels of meaning, that is, we practice exegesis. Dante knew this exceedingly well (Tenth Letter to Can Grande della Scala), and before him Thomas Aquinas had explicated it in a magisterial way in his Summa Theologica , beginning with the literal dimension, turning to the typological or allegorical, then to the tropological or moral, and finally reaching the anagogical or spiritual (Henri de Lubac, S.J., Exegese medievale, 1959). Of course, some of the most painful conflicts in the history of Western civilization were the results of differing readings of texts (Jews versus Christians; see now Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 2007) and their meanings. …