Stanley Fish on reading Pres. Obama's inauguration speech

Stanley Fish, an English & law professor, writes in the New York Times this week about reading (as opposed to listening to) President Obama's inauguration speech. Fish discusses two possible modes of (close) reading: pondering the significance of each individual sentiment, or treating the text as a cumulative argument, in which each part builds upon the last and moves towards an end point or summation. He argues that Obama's prose style invites one of these kinds of reading, and not the other.