Close Reading, "Unpacking a Text," Heuristic Reading, Deconstructionist Reading

The terms in the title of this post are not synonymous, though they are often bandied about in graduate seminars and conferences as being so. They all simply refer to focusing a response on a text on a single line, sometimes as in deconstruction, a single word, and using that line or word as a metonym for the meaning of the entire text. It's a neat trick, that if done well allows you to steal the thunder of the original text and use it as your own. Below is an example from another blog I write (https://runningwithplato.blogspot.com/) that follows the summary/response model I've asked you all to use in the class blog.

Some of you are using close reading already, which is great. I'd like to see all of you give it a try. It is the hallmark of the best theoretical writing in the humanities. As one of my former professors, who was on a search committee tasked with hiring a new colleague, said, "We read their writing samples and look for a close reading. If we don't see one, they don't go on our interview list." So, give close reading a try. It's an important skill for academics to learn. And even if you don't use it again after this class, learning how to read a text at this level will be good exercise for your brain.

"Mosquito battle gets political: Genetic engineering plan raises fears of 'Jurassic Park' invasion"

https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2017/10/5/mosquito-battle-gets-political.html
 

This article discusses the ongoing controversy over releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in Key West, Florida, to combat the spread of mosquito born disease. As the sub-title suggests, people have equated genetic engineering with the movie Jurassic Park.


Explaining resistance to the plan, James Lavery, the Hilton Chair in Global Health Ethics at Emory University, admits, “We have this kind of arrogance as scientists that once the findings will speak for themselves, then everything will change." He adds, “I always say that stories trump data and relationships trump stories. Scientists just sort of believe  that their data should prevail at all times because it’s science, but we know from policy that that’s just not the way it works.”

Is it too much to match Lavery's terms--data, stories, relationships--with logos, pathos, ethos? If we do, what does that get us?

We certainly get a different way of thinking of these three terms than the standard interpretation from Aristotle. Logos matches data pretty well, though we know the term meant much more than this to the Greeks. Pathos in this quotation becomes stories, and the ways they move us. I can remember crying when Old Yeller died, even though I knew the dog playing Old Yeller in the movie didn't actually die, that since I saw the movie years after it was filmed, had probably already been dead for years. But, that data didn't matter to me. I cried. That's what stories do to us, they move us, not necessarily in tandem with the data, though not necessarily against it either. In science, according to Lavery, there often isn't any story at all; therefore, the data has almost no impact. We might go as far as to say that it doesn't even have logos, if by logos we mean that connection between reality and the intellect contained in that companion word, nous, also critical to Greek ideals. Ethos, in this rewriting, takes on a stronger position in the digital age even than it did for the Greeks. In the Polis, all interaction was built on strong personal connections that aren't sufficiently captured by the word, "friendship." Everyone knew from long experience almost everyone they came into contact with. In the multicultural, digital, social networked age we live in, our range of acquaintances is broad--and confused, fuzzy, often as in the case of celebrities, entirely fictional. Because these relationships are so small in comparison to society as a whole, and how we number who to include in the category "relationships" has become so tenuous, ethos has become even more powerful for us than it was for the Athenians, yet potentially so much more deceiving. Add the way so many of us only follow internet news that supports our preconceptions and you have a formula for belief in conclusions with no premises as all.