If we took stock of everything that we know and compared it to what we don't know, we'd find that we know a lot about almost nothing.1 As we explore new things, we need tools which give us an idea of what we're working with even when we don't know what it is. In textual scholarship, we like to do close readings: understanding all the nuances of a text word by word so that we can tease out almost hidden meanings that rely on us understanding the text as well as its context.2 Sometimes, we don't have a text or a context, but the effect of the text upon an audience. Or, to put it in more practical terms, we can't tell what goes on inside an author's mind, but we do have the resulting text. What can we learn about that mind from the text it produces?
- In statistics, saying that something is "almost never" and "has zero probability" are pretty much the same. If we counted all the things that we know and divided it by the number of things that we don't know, the result would be almost zero. It is ironic that the more we study, the closer the ratio gets to zero. ↩
- See Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" for a humorous example of text within context. ↩