Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

ÉVA ANTAL The Rhetoric and Ethics of Reading

58 Éva Antal I follow the usage of common speech in calling this semiological enigma 'rhetorical'. The grammatical model of the question becomes rhetorical not when we have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other hand a figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be entirely incompatible) prevails. Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential abberations. (de Man AR, 10) In the next sentence as antecedents, de Man refers not to Derrida's impact, but he mentions two modernist critics of the school named New Criticism: Monroe Breadsley and William Wimsatt, who also recognized the importance of the rhetorical in textual understanding. It also shows us that if we want to understand the rhetoric and later the ethics of reading, we have to map the preliminaries. That is, to understand the postmodern reading practice and its ethical implications, first, we need to know about the modernist view of reading, which gives the immediate context of American deconstruction. In America in the 1940s~50s, having realised that students could not do anything with pieces of literature (especially, with poems), university teachers

—John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Rene Wellek, Allan Tate, William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks

—developed and used a new method to analyse literary and philosophical texts. Besides practical textbooks written to students

—eg. the famous 'understanding-series' (Understanding Poetry

, Understanding Fiction

)—their articles and studies were also concerned with the theory of literature, literary language and literary criticism; we can think of the well-known 'Wellek-Warren-book' titled Theory of Literature. Thus, it can be said that their mission

—and they really took their work in such a way

—made them immensely influential and productive. What was new in their criticism? They deliberately acted against the branches of contemporary criticism, such as sociological, biographical or philological criticism, and demanded a more systematic and more rigorous approach in reading. They claimed that literary language differed from any other kind of language; consequently, critics, teachers, students, that is, readers had to concentrate on the texts themselves. In their work, Literary Criticism, Wimsatt and Brooks define "the principle task of criticism

— perhaps the task of criticism

—is to make explicit to the reader the implicit manifold of meanings" (652). They also undertook the task of improving the readers, not the authors, by showing them the complexity and inexhaustible richness of the literary works. The key terms of their theoretically based approach are: "close