I have gone through my own practice and tried to identify the things I tend to do. The first is recurrences. I’m sort of an auteur critic in the sense that if I find a writer interesting, I try to read all their work. I do the same thing with musicians and painters. And when you do that, what you begin to notice are recurrences. As I say, I began with style studies, where one paid close attention to tics—not themes but peculiarities, eccentricities, recurrent expressions in a writer’s style. And from there one began to deduce a Weltanschauung. Spitzer calls it a kind of hermeneutic circle. Doesn’t matter what you call it, but Spitzer’s idea is that you find some stylistic peculiarity in a writer and then you begin to find other ones, and when you connect them they form a distinctive worldview. I take style as the central thing. Style meaning precisely this recurrence of certain forms and certain idioms—idiolects, if you like.