There’s a cottage industry that seems to grow with every new generation of scholars with the capture, tagging and release of canonical texts. From the first hermeneutics to narratology to New Historicism to the great unknown of Google Scholar and its agenda, there’s an insistent sour desire to make the “outputs” of interpreters determinate. There’s an insistent faith that as each new strata of complexity is identified as texts are burrowed into, the goods scholars produce will yield an ordered surplus to make the work of the next generation easier. Or more realistically, to render it impossible, since what’s at faith is the goal to standardize meaning in a text.
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