ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, The Analytic Reader, is dedicated to an examination of the pragmatics of reading in light of modern and contemporary concerns for the twin notions of experience and language. Like the meditative reader, the analytic reader shares a common preoccupation for praxis as a defining and possibly unsurpassable principle, connected with potentially therapeutic objectives. This chapter begins with an overview of empiricism’s claims to knowledge to demonstrate how, in spite of a commitment to experience, the foundational tendencies in empiricism (and some empirical pragmatists) prove problematic in the context of a hermeneutic approach. I argue that interpreting experience risks aestheticizing it, while understanding interpretation as a form of experience represents a different and preferable perspective. On this basis, I enquire into the use of notions of embodiment and context in literary criticism devoted to contemporary poetry, namely the poetry of Larry Eigner, to show that language—rather than the non-discursive world—remains central to any experience-based thinking.
