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
The Rhetoric and Ethics of Reading 61 structured world" (Wellek 228). As Wellek quotes Brooks's claim, namely, poetry gives "a special kind of knowledge. .. through poetry, man comes to know himself in relation to reality, and thus attains wisdom" (Wellek 229). The New Critics also have their belief in a strong sense of community expressed by the romantic idea of 'organic unity'. Actually, I characterised their reading technique as 'ironic' paying attention to the rhetorical forces of a given text, it is better called "irenic" striving for the equilibrium of those forces. Although we can find the New Critical approach quite positive and fruitful, we have to admit its basic idealistic naivity resulting from the modernist efforts aimed at solving the surrounding chaos of the world. Their desired vaulted arch symbolizing understanding can refer to perfection, but we cannot forget that it is suspended in the air between two solid, but imagined buildings. In his early critical writings (Blindness and Insight ) Paul de Man, one of the four Yale-deconstructors, deals with this shift from 'close(d)' reading to the open —later with his term named as allegorical —reading. In his essay titled "Form and Intent in the American New Criticism" he says, though the New Critics noticed the importance of and paid attention to such distinctive features of literary language as ambiguity or irony, these structural elements themselves contradicted the very premises on which the New Criticism with its central "totalizing principle" was founded. In the key paragraph he describes this process: As it refines its interpretations more and more, American criticism does not discover a single meaning, but a plurality of significations that can be radically opposed to each other. Almost in spite of itself, it pushes the interpretative process so far that the analogy between the organic world and the language of poetry finally explodes. This unitarian criticism finally becomes a criticism of ambiguity, an ironic reflection on the absence of the unity it had postulated, (de Man BI, 28) Actually, it seems as if de Man had thought over the new critical approach of reading —reading its theory closely —, and on the basis of its faults or 'blind spots' and 'insights' he developed his later ideas. According to de Man, the greatest mistake of New Criticism was, while they tried to pay "such patient and delicate attention to the reading of forms" (de Man BI, 29), the presupposed idea of totality forced them to find closed forms and to strive for order. It can be said that they simply used Heidegger's theory of hermeneutical circularity, but they forgot about the fact that the (hermeneutical) act of understanding is a temporal one. As de Man remarks: "yet, the temporal factor, so persistently forgotten, should remind us that
