Word: textualism
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Unfortunately, Bercovitch's own rhetorical strategy is far less compelling. The basic plan of his book--which begins with a close textual analysis of Mather's study of Winthrop and expands into an examination of its cultural context and implications as a testament to American identity--is potentially workable, even exciting. What mars its execution, however, is Bercovitch's overfondness for long, convoluted sentences punctuated with Latin expressions, his heavy use of quotations, and the slowness with which he moves from concept to concept. Together these flaws give his prose a muddy, static quality...
...essay which best demonstrates the intimate connection between the different levels of analysis Marcus employs in reading a text is "Language Into Structure: Pickwick Papers," a piece on Dickens, the subject of his first book and the writer to whom he constantly returns. Having shown through a detailed textual analysis that the novel is about to plunge into the unrestricted use of language, an implicit claim that the novelist can represent anything he likes in language, Marcus points to the conclusion of the novel in which the misuse of language by the law puts Pickwick in prison...
...case in point, one might take Yassar Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Every month some newspaper or semi-intellectual magazine will publish an article which purports to demonstrate, by close textual analysis, and by supplying what is left out but supposedly implicit, that the PLO has decided to recognize Israel's right to exist. This method of studying international developments is not entirely without validity, and in the case of the PLO is even necessary, since it is not particularly likely that Arafat will, in the near future, issue a point-by-point peace proposal. But code deciphering...
...James. As he worked toward a full professorship (in 1948 he became the first Jew to receive tenure in the English department) Trilling slowly gained the reputation of someone more than a courtly scholar. His doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold was published in 1939-in the heyday of the textual analyses by the New Criticism-and it restated the Arnoldian creed that "a work of literature ... has value as a criticism of life...
...citizens; he gave undue aid and comfort to the narrow and meanspirited. Acutely conscious that middle-and low-income whites alike were resentful of the special efforts that were being made to ease the plight of America's 20 million blacks, Nixon adopted a hands-off approach. His textual justification, wrenched out of its context, was Moynihan's statement that "the time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect." Moynihan was saying not only that the issue had been "too much talked about" but also that other minorities (Indians...