Rhetorician Richard A. Lanham's term for "exhaustive rhetorical description"--a method of prose analysis that involves identifying the figures of speech in a passage and examining the patterns and effects created by those figures.
See also:
- Close Reading
- Rhetorical Analysis
- Rhetorical Analysis of E B. White's "The Ring of Time"
- Squeezing E.B. White
- Tool Kit for Rhetorical Analysis
Etymology:
The expression "lemon-squeezer school of criticism" was originally used in 1933 by the poet and critic T.S. Eliot to disparage critical methods that relied on detailed verbal exegesis (also known as "close reading" or "practical criticism").Observations:
"'Lemon squeezer' is . . . a modern term, then, for an old-fashioned exercise--exhaustive rhetorical description. Find every verbal pattern you can in a given text. . . .
"What conclusions emerge from this analysis? This kind of analysis? Well, to start, a miscellaneous pulling of first one thread then another, a random description, quickly starts building a coherent whole. . . .
"The second conclusion stands equally clear: this kind of analysis could go on forever. There seems to be no natural, logical place to stop. . . . You use the lemon squeezer as a generalized search technique that gradually exposes the fundamental shapes a prose is composed of. As you come to see these, they will determine which kinds of patterns you continue to seek and which terms--of the many overlapping ones, large scale and small--you choose as essentially descriptive. . . .
"The nomenclatural game, fun in itself, leads to a critical understanding which in turn reclarifies and redefines the nomenclature. No wonder this kind of description is the oldest technique for prose analysis we have. Creaky and awkward though it can be, it works."
(Richard A. Lanham, Analyzing Prose, 2nd ed. Continuum, 2003)
