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It is therefore, a great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transient things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.
- Hugo of St. Victor (Qtd. in Said 2000, 185)
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In a recent essay I wrote for a volume of the on-line journal Wreck Park celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Edward W. Said's Culture and Imperial edited by my former students, Robert Ryan, Marcus Heiligenthal, and James FitzGerald, I noted, in passing, that my contribution would, "by way of a now unfashionable 'close reading' of a brief section of the terminal chapter of Said's text, focus my commentary on his account of the disclosive liminal point in the development of the narrative logic of the Western nation-state / imperial project" (Spanos 2016). Since then then, however, the phrase has taken on a charge that refuses to diminish, and that is no doubt because the question of "close reading" has been a troubling concern to me from the beginning of my career as a literary critic in the late 1950's and early1960's, when the New Criticism and Modernism were in the ascendency in the American academy.
Having been engaged by French existentialism after bearing traumatic witness to the fire-bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war in World War II, I found the New Critics' dominant thesis about the autotelic poem, derived from what they represented as the self-identical form of Modernist poetry, woefully inadequate to the urgent historical realities of that, to me, liminal post-war occasion. I mean, above all, their deliberate anti-humanist indifference to the emergent existentialist ontology that radically reversed the dominant traditional Western interpretation of being, encapsulated by the formula "essence precedes existence," to read "existence precede essence," a revolutionary reversal that abandoned the...