To Each According to Their Needs: Readerly Desire in Rhetorical Poetics and in Jesus' Son

Abstract

This essay responds to the distinction rhetorical poetics draws between critical approaches that are a priori and those that are a posteriori. A priori approaches tend toward political commitments feared to result in injustice to, in any given case, the rhetorical actions of this author. In contrast, greater justice is taken to be done when rhetorical poetics’ a posteriori reconstruction of authorial design joins a feedback loop that includes other readers and textual phenomena. To examine and adjust this distinction, I provide a reading of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son , a reading from which follows the suggestion that if rhetorical poetics’ political conception of justice were foregrounded, its feedback loop might more receptively engage feminist and other ideological approaches, thus lessening the exaggerated distance between them.