ABSTRACT
Conventional accounts of the modern/postmodern demarcate the advent of deconstruction as a distinctive “turn” in the practice of interpretation. This chapter argues that there is in fact considerable continuity between deconstruction and predecessor practices, especially in the concomitant claims to the practice of close reading in the service of elucidating a reading experience that is the keynote of the human’s experience of being. To that end, the chapter compares writings by Nathan Scott, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida toward a greater continuity of theory and practice in twentieth-century modes of interpretation. The linguistic turn not only embraces all of these but assembles them as siblings whose quarrels are less significant than their shared DNA.
