Intro
Religio Medici is a medieval text by a dude named Sir Thomas Browne. It's kind of an autobiography, in which Browne talks about the Bible, religion, and spiritual life. In his essay "Literature in the Reader; Affective Stylistics," Stanley Fish analyzes the passage below from a Reader-Response perspective. Fish was especially interested in the first sentence. Let's have a look:
Quote
That Judas perished by hanging himself, there is no certainty in Scripture: though, in one place, it seems to affirm it, and, by a doubtful word, hath given occasion to translate it; yet, in another place, in a more punctual description, it makes it improbably and seems to overthrow it. That our fathers, after the flood, erected the tower of Babel, to preserve themselves against a second deluge, is generally opinioned and believed; yet is there another intention of theirs expressed in Scripture.
Analysis
Fish says that when we read the first sentence of the passage above, we are totally confused. This sentence doesn't actually tell us anything. What the sentence does, according to Fish, is make things more and more uncertain.
At first we think we're on solid ground. "That Judas perished by hanging himself," leads us readers to jump immediately to the conclusion that Judas hanged himself because he was a bad guy. But not so fast. The next four words—"there is no certainty"—reverse our expectations. Judas may not have killed himself.
Hmmm.
The words in the rest of the sentence amplify this sense of uncertainty: "doubtful," "improbably," "overthrow." By the end of the sentence, we've pretty much slipped to the end of a slippery slope. Did or didn't Judas kill himself? Was he or was he not a bad guy? What do the Scriptures say, and what don't they say?
As Stanley Fish points out, the prose leads us on without actually verifying or confirming anything.
By asking Fish's favorite question—"What does this sentence do?"—we see that this sentence is an event. It makes things happen to us readers. It makes us unsure of ourselves, of what we're reading. It makes us confused—and our confusion is the whole point of the sentence.