Deconstructing: close reading, rhetorical criticism, and historiography of persecution and heresy

The deconstruction of extant sources requires the discipline of close reading. Trained as a philologist, I retain the conviction that discourse in its written form must be scrutinized carefully in order to discover and uncover whatever historical reality it may contain. Discourse, as Emile Benveniste defined it, encompasses both an oral form and written manifestations which reproduce the oral. This definition suits the analysis of preaching and the sermon quite well, since we are dealing with written vestiges of an oral genre. It also supports the view that the text or speech act is inseparable from the speaker/author, the speaker's intent, and the audience: discourse belongs to a social universe that it reflects. Analysis of discourse entails asking fundamental questions about the text and rests on the close reading, which is often called the explication de texte.

Text and author

To search for the author's voice, the explication de texte provides a starting point: the in-depth analysis of a text directs the reader toward uncovering the writer's point of view, ideas, and intentions, and analysing how these are brought to light and emphasized. The methods of the explication de texte, like those of exegesis, generally employ contextual approaches of literary criticism which examine a passage with attention to its content, historical and literary context, genre, language, development and themes.