Word: textual
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Press Piles On. Once textual fidelity became an issue, reporters found earlier cases in which Biden had failed to give proper citation to Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. By themselves these transgressions would not have been worth noting...
JOHNSON'S PREMISE that a poem, a Supreme Court ruling, and a "CIA manual on psychological operations in guerilla warfare" can all be reduced to rhetoric emphasizes--as does critical legal studies, as she points out--the process of textual interpretation...
...twist. He likens legitimate social critique to the reading of literature. Just as there may be no definitive best reading of a poem, Walzer argues, so neither you nor your roommate may be able to give the best interpretation of your earlier agreement. But neither the difficulty of textual criticism nor that of resolving exactly what you meant four weeks ago needs prevent your attempt to do just that. when your roommate says,"you think Madonna is disturbing--I can't work without her," you can respond by pointing out the noise level and the possibility that a Walkman might...
Walzer's argument that all social criticism should be akin to the textual interpretation of a book both the critic and criticized party have read is not totally convincing. If Walzer's analogy were complete, for example, we would have to write or co-author as well as read all those books we criticize. Hermeneutics, to give Walzer's interpretive model its formal title, is a fascinating philosophical strategy with a massive history in European thought. But its application to political criticism needs more analysis and justification than has yet been generated...
...struggle to synthesize two moral languages, that of American democracy on the one hand and that of the Jewish shtetl on the other? Such an argument would account for Walzer often slipping into a language of universal human rights. But it would explain equally well why Walzer finds in textual criticism his model for social criticism. Has not the community of which he is a part survived by finding a homeland in religious texts...