I was watching a crash course video on literature (because i really liked their history series) and one idea they had was that authorial intent doesn't matter, its the symbolic resonance that the reader gets from the reading that matters.
But if this is true then there should be no value in symbolism that you personally don't pick up on. If we're going to go existentialist, why does it matter if some literary critics and professors see that symbolism? Its hard to say that its objectively there if some people see it, some people don't, and the person who wrote the words somehow missed it.
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Because a work of art is something created for a purpose. A beautiful waterfall is beautiful, but unless a human hand was involved in making it, it is not art. The word art is the same word as in artificial (something designed), artifact (a product of a design process), and so on. It is all well and good to say authorial intent doesn't exist, that doesn't make it true.
I was watching a crash course video on literature (because i really liked their history series) and one idea they had was that authorial intent doesn't matter, its the symbolic resonance that the reader gets from the reading that matters.
But if this is true then there should be no value in symbolism that you personally don't pick up on. If we're going to go existentialist, why does it matter if some literary critics and professors see that symbolism? Its hard to say that its objectively there if some people see it, some people don't, and the person who wrote the words somehow missed it.
Perhaps you should enroll in a ENGL 3000 or higher course and find out :D
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Ah yes, this again. It's pretty much a bunch of ego-stroking BS.
If we're going to go existentialist, why does it matter if some literary critics and professors see that symbolism?
As a life-long reader, bibliophile and goblin of letters: it doesn't. Very little in the world of literature matters, except to literary enthusiasts.
Most incomprehensible book that I've ever read without the benefit of a literature professor:
What's yours?
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Moby Dick. It's just about a whale.
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We could certainly use more racists who write books in which poor young white kids opt for eternal damnation in order to help a slave escape.
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Basically, because literature examination is no longer full of honest people, but of people pushing petty agendas.
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Anyone who thinks this is new has no idea what they're talking about.
Cue: the discussion of "immoral" novels since, since, well, since novels were invented.
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I was watching a crash course video on literature (because i really liked their history series) and one idea they had was that authorial intent doesn't matter, its the symbolic resonance that the reader gets from the reading that matters.
Your crash course video is a little out of date. Postmodernism in literature (which is where the theory you describe came from) was one of the dominant paradigms in the 1970s and 1980s, but has largely vanished. I believe one of the major art museums in London had a retrospective exhibition entitled something like "Postmodernism : 1970-1990" within the last few years.
As with so many intellectual fads, this particular form of deconstruction had a few good ideas that were rapidly overemphasized to the point of fatuity. The major good idea is that the author's consciously expressed beliefs do not have any sort of authority over her work, and that others may (correctly) infer unexplored aspects of her writing of which she was not aware. A well-documented example of that is the anti-Semitism implicit in much of the writing of Dorothy L. Sayers. There's very deep strain of cultural anti-Semitism throughout most of her detective fiction, and even though the Jewish characters are generally portrayed sympathetically and in a positive light, they're still deeply caricatured in a way that wouldn't be out of place in the Merchant of Venice, and the portrayal of Jews in general verges on the offensive. Miss Sayers was deeply offended at any suggestion that her writing was in any way anti-Semitic, but it's not too hard for a careful reader to spot -- which suggests either Miss Sayers was lying, or simply unaware of many of her unexamined (but expressed) biases.
So in this sense, authorial intent doesn't matter, because even if she intended to write a book that wasn't anti-Semitic, she obviously failed. Similarly, an author may not be aware of the symbolism she puts into a book because she's not aware of the deeper meanings or historical associations of what she writes, and it can improve both our understanding of the book and of the writer to see where the symbols come from.
Of course, no specific person in particular needs to read for deeper understanding. If you yourself think that Moby Dick is just a story about a fishing trip, and you enjoy it as such, have fun. But that doesn't eliminate the culture (both content and context) of the symbols in the book.
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Basically, because literature examination is no longer full of honest people, but of people pushing petty agendas.
I don't believe any intellectual discipline was ever full of anything except people pushing petty agendas.
Basically, "pushing petty agendas" is what people do. Except that "agenda" is already plural. So more classically educated people push petty agenda.
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"It is significant that one of the most brutal attacks on the Oz books was made in 1957 by the director of the Detroit Library System, a Mr. Ralph Ulveling, who found the Oz books to 'have a cowardly approah to life.' They are also guilty of 'negativism.' Worst of all, 'there is nothing uplifting or elevating about the Baum series.' For the Librarian of Detroit, courage and affirmation mean punching the clock and then doing the dull work of a machine while never questioning the system. Our governors not only know what is good for us, they never let up. From monitoring the books that are read in grade school to the brass handshake and the pension (whose fund is always in jeopardy) at the end, they are forever on the job. They have to be because they know that there is no greater danger to their order than a worker whose daydreams are not of television sets and sex but of differently ordered worlds. Fortunately, the system of government that controls the school system and makes possible the consumer society does not control all of publishing; otherwise, much imaginative writing might exist only in samizdat."
--Gore Vidal, random example that I grabbed because I used it before in the Good Books thread. Pushing petty political agendas in the world of book-chat is nowhere near new.
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Basically, "pushing petty agendas" is what people do. Except that "agenda" is already plural. So more classically educated people push petty agenda.
I was watching a crash course video on literature (because i really liked their history series) and one idea they had was that authorial intent doesn't matter, its the symbolic resonance that the reader gets from the reading that matters.Your crash course video is a little out of date. Postmodernism in literature (which is where the theory you describe came from)
I don't think this is true.
Not that I know much about postmodernism, but I didn't get the sense that Wimsatt and Beardsley were pomo's. I could be wrong, though.
I don't think this is true.I was watching a crash course video on literature (because i really liked their history series) and one idea they had was that authorial intent doesn't matter, its the symbolic resonance that the reader gets from the reading that matters.Your crash course video is a little out of date. Postmodernism in literature (which is where the theory you describe came from)
<shrug>. You're entitled to your opinion. If you go back far enough, "there is nothing new under the sun," but the most influential expression of this idea is Roland Barthes and "The Death of the Author" (1967). See also Derrida's "there is nothing outside the text," which I believe comes from On Grammatology, also 1967. Of course these two philosophers didn't miraculously appear on the scene like Minerva from Zeus' forehead, but the simple fact that Wimsatt was having to argue for what by 1975 was common practice confirms that Wimsatt's position was hardly the controlling theory it would become.
Yeah, I know, Sontag and all that shiznit.
Still, "New Criticism, as espoused by Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, T. S. Eliot, and others, argued that authorial intent is irrelevant to understanding a work of literature. W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote in their essay The Intentional Fallacy: "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."[1] (from wikipedia)
Which predates Bathes by a good 20 years.
[Shrugs]
You're also entitled to your opinion.
Edit: Oops, you edited.
Edit 2: Woopsie, it's John Crowe Ransom's New Criticism which predates Barthes by two decades; "The Intentional Fallacy" only predates him by one.
.
Wait... are you saying it's all made up and can basically mean anything?
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Responding to the OP -- on the assumption that you're genuinely interested in the question and not just being snarky --
There are several, meh, "political parties" in literary theory and you're right, at least one of those doesn't care AT ALL what the author's intent may or may not have been. One of my colleagues (years ago) was a very vocal member of that group of critics. One of the first things she would drum into her Undergrads was "Who cares what Shakespeare thought!?"
Other "political parties" have different philosophies or agendas or what have you and when critics publish their own material it's pretty much always pushing their own team's beliefs in the world of publish or perish. You can probably pretty easily find the various schools of literary theory and what they're all about (and who hates whom) on the web somewhere. Maybe Wikipedia is a good place to start.
The political party that the link in the OP sounds like is called "Reader Response Criticism" (creatively enough) but there are plenty of others who dismiss that school as petty mental masturbation. (Although maybe it's all mental masturbation (and maybe that's never petty.))
I personally (back when I was in publish or perish) was a proud New Historicist, arguing the literary day of a "history of ideas" -- basically arguing that it don't matter so much what the author intended (he or she can only create something from the Times in which he or she lived) and maybe even it don't matter so much what the reader gets cuz the reader can only get from the text what his or her own Time & culture can allow.
Anyway, this ain't exactly stuff that casual readers or little undergrads (those not interested in Grad school) would likely care about.
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In the first LitCrit class I took during my undergraduate days, we read The Great Gatsby six or eight times, each time looking at it through a different "lens" (school of criticism). By the end we discovered that Fitzgerald was (shock!) a classist, racist, sexist, imperialist, Marxist homophobe with subliminated gay tendencies. Was Fitzgerald all (or any) of these things? Who knows. What I took away from it was that as far as critical theories go, 1)It all matters; 2)None of it matters as much as zealots of a particular theory might want you to believe.
Critics (taking a slightly broader view of criticism) whether academic or popular, or for literature, music, food or anything, are an interesting lot. Most claim to be the arbiters of what is acceptable, taste-wise, in their respective fields, but the truth is, if you can decide for yourself what is tasteful and what you enjoy, you don't need them. The critics are therefore biased against anything popular, or that becomes popular, because if the masses can figure it out for themselves, the critics becomes unnecessary.
The same principle applies to literature professors (or professors in any area where interpretation is needed): if the students read texts where it's not necessary for the professor to decode meaning for the students, the professors become unnecessary. Therefore, texts that get read in Literature programs (and particularly LitCrit classes) become ever more arcane and obscure, and authors who want to be taken seriously by the literary establishment make alter their writing to match.
I've read Finnegan's Wake, but I can't make much sense out of it, and in the end, I don't really care to expend the time and energy to do so. I don't thing it makes me any less of a person or English teacher, though.
Responding to the OP -- on the assumption that you're genuinely interested in the question and not just being snarky --
Thats never really an "or" around here... :)
The political party that the link in the OP sounds like is called "Reader Response Criticism" (creatively enough) but there are plenty of others who dismiss that school as petty mental masturbation. (Although maybe it's all mental masturbation (and maybe that's never petty.))
Or all of it is...
Anyway, this ain't exactly stuff that casual readers or little undergrads (those not interested in Grad school) would likely care about.
Well good to know not all literary types embrace the inanity...
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Of course, no specific person in particular needs to read for deeper understanding. If you yourself think that Moby Dick is just a story about a fishing trip, and you enjoy it as such, have fun. But that doesn't eliminate the culture (both content and context) of the symbols in the book.
I would argue that some of the layers of symbolism (past what the author either had in mind or clearly had on their mind while writing) aren't deep, they're bull. At some point its like reading tea leaves or looking at clouds and insisting that the shapes you see are actually there.
1. You get -25 points for the common misuse of the term existentialist.
50 dkp minus for the etymological fallacy. That usage is so common it's become the definition. :)
2. The relationship between a work of art or letters and that of it's audience is in itself an insight into culture.
This assumes that the audience is literature professors.
It's almost as significant as our ability to create language.
or our ability to see an abstraction of something in a random pattern.
3. Art has impact. Whether that impact is in line with the intention of the author is irrelevant to the impact as well.
But how much impact can it have on such a small group of people?
Of course, no specific person in particular needs to read for deeper understanding. If you yourself think that Moby Dick is just a story about a fishing trip, and you enjoy it as such, have fun. But that doesn't eliminate the culture (both content and context) of the symbols in the book.I would argue that some of the layers of symbolism (past what the author either had in mind or clearly had on their mind while writing) aren't deep, they're bull. At some point its like reading tea leaves or looking at clouds and insisting that the shapes you see are actually there.
That's because there are no layers of symbolism. Moby Dick is the fictionalized account of an actual journal from a real whale hunter. All the author did was change a couple of personality traits and the ending.
Moby Dick is a classic example of how literary theorists read a lot of meaning into works that really had no deep meaning at all. Shakespeare is another example.
What small group of people?
Literature professors/critics.
Seriously, unless you're reading the author's notes or he somehow tells you what he was thinking, all you've got is the impact on the reader.
Do they do surveys about what the green light in the great gatsby means or something?
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The great thing about symbolism is that it can work even when you're not consciously interpreting it. Or when the author didn't intend it.
That sounds like the exact opposite of a great thing to me.
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. The great thing about symbolism is that it can work even when you're not consciously interpreting it. Or when the author didn't intend it.
That sounds very much like -that fluffy cloud looks like a bunny. It will be on the test tommorow, and you had better say its a bunny-
Why is one persons "I see the symbolism" deeper and more valid than another persons "I DON"T see the symbolism"
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The great thing about symbolism is that it can work even when you're not consciously interpreting it. Or when the author didn't intend it.That sounds like the exact opposite of a great thing to me.
Let me explain this in a little more detail.
This is something that happens to us - we in this conversation, and others like it, specifically - all the time, because of the problems of communication via text over the internet. Something is said, and someone else interprets something out of it that the original poster/writer/author did not intend, and extrapolates their reaction from there.
We've seen where that leads.
What's happening here is a basic issue of miscommunication. There's something being said that is not sending the message intended by the author - because they misworded something they said, because the reader detects (or thinks they detect) some subtext where there is none, or simply because the reader is determined to have a particular reaction to something regardless of what it actually says. For one reason or another, the text is somehow inadequate and someone is getting the wrong impression.
The problem is there is a whole group of readers who have latched onto their own impression to the point of rejecting the original intent.
And speaking as an amateur writer myself, I consider that a failure. The purpose of writing is to convey knowledge and information from one person to another. If the reader does not receive the information I intended from what I wrote, someone somewhere in the chain of communication failed to do their job right.
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There are levels of criticism that can be empirically tested, however. Example in point, Rodney Whittaker was a professor of film. He watched some James Bond movies that were successful, and decided that, with his analysis of them, he could turn around and write a bestselling spy novel that would actually be a spoof of the genre, if you analyzed it -- but that most readers wouldn't pick up on.
Turns out he was right on both counts -- and proved it three times. "Trevanian" published The Eiger Sanction (made into an action movie starring and directed by Clint Eastwood), The Loo Sanction, and Shibumi. Each one was more outrageously satyrizing the genre than the last. Each one was nevertheless praised as a magnificnent novel of suspense.
Someone once told me that Steve Winwood's 1980s "comeback" was the result of a bet: "I know enough about music that I could record a pop record at any time and be confident I'd make millions from it."
There are levels of criticism that can be empirically tested, however. Example in point, Rodney Whittaker was a professor of film. He watched some James Bond movies that were successful, and decided that, with his analysis of them, he could turn around and write a bestselling spy novel that would actually be a spoof of the genre, if you analyzed it -- but that most readers wouldn't pick up on.
Turns out he was right on both counts -- and proved it three times. "Trevanian" published The Eiger Sanction (made into a movie by Clint Eastwood), The Loo Sanction, and Shibumi. Each one was more outrageously satyrizing the genre than the last. Each one was nevertheless praised as a magnificnent novel of suspense.
Someone once told me that Steve Winwood's 1980s "comeback" was the result of a bet: "I know enough about music that I could record some pointless pop drivel at any time and be confident I'd make millions from it."
On the other hand how many professors of literature are in the those that can't do teach crowd?
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are in the those that can't do teach crowd?
???
EDIT: Oh, I get it. Quotes and punctuation needed.
Are in the "those that can't do, teach!" crowd.
I have no idea, obviously, but a few counterexamples tell me that it's not always safe to assume. I once had a professor of metamorphic petrology that we thought was a stuffed shirt geek of no particular talent. Turns out he had published the time-pressure-temperature pathways "Bible" and had people coming from other continents for the chance to study with him.
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Turns out he had published the time-pressure-temperature pathways "Bible" and had people coming from other continents for the chance to study with him.
Vast difference between the sciences and the humanities: In the sciences the universe itself wields the scary red pen that tells you you're wrong (sometimes by making you go boom). In the humanities that pen is wielded by... other humanities experts.
If I might jump in, I find these sorts of discussions interesting, because they do raise questions about what we think literature actually does and why we study it in the ways we do.
To start with the opening poster’s first question, like thejeff said, one of the reasons some people forcefully argue that an author’s intent is irrelevant is because for many purposes what one has to work with is just the text itself: there are no do-overs, typically, if I may be flippant, and the author can’t normally say, “But that’s not what I meant!” Unless we can actually have a conversation with them, we have to rely on what they said, and remember Humpty Dumpty’s advice to Alice (I think).
The catch is, different people can pick up on little details and build up something the author certainly didn’t intend (let’s imagine they’re around to tell us so), but I find it difficult to exclude that from the possibilities of what the text means unless it significantly contradicts the rest of the text outright. At this point, it’s about taste, and rhetoric, convincing other people that what one’s seen in a text is actually interesting.
That brings us to what literature is actually for, and who says so. The idea that vernacular literatures are actually worth studying is comparatively new, and we can compare that to what a classical education was traditionally for, and to how higher education works today. In the last case, the history of New Criticism is particularly useful. It really popularized the idea of close reading of even isolated excerpts from longer texts, not coincidentally at a period when more and more people were entering the universities (after the war), perhaps without a reading background as extensive as the (previously, traditionally) “cultivated classes,” and one of its prominent exponents was a Modernist darling famed for the difficulty of his verse.
It can all sound a bit venal, but then again it depends on the questions one wants to ask of literature. If one wants to pin down what a text probably meant for its original audience, of course what can be gleaned of the author’s intent from notes, idiosyncrasies of style (X always uses this word to refer to that concept), and historical connotations in their register are all very important things. If one’s more interested in what one’s own contemporaries get from a text, even one read casually, or in teaching a room of GIs who may not have been immersed in Shakespeare from birth how to think critically and argue persuasively for their own interpretations, rather than turn them all into literary historians, not so much.
How things get into the literary canon is a different (but related) matter, and somebody like that goblin Anklebiter could probably get into it with a lot more verve than I. :)
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Oh. I'm sorry. I'm backing out of this conversation. I forgot this was part of BNW's "humanities are stupid and useless" theme.
Evidence for the hypothesis continues to accrue.
If one’s more interested in what one’s own contemporaries get from a text, even one read casually, or in teaching a room of GIs who may not have been immersed in Shakespeare from birth how to think critically and argue persuasively for their own interpretations, rather than turn them all into literary historians, not so much.
Well, what makes a room full of English professors opinions on the matter better than the GI book club?
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I was seven minutes late punching in today.
My supervisor, who isn't even old enough to drink alcohol legally, asked me why I was late.
Now, as a trade union militant and a proud Teamster, there are few things that make me madder than having to tell some little snot-nosed punk why I am late. Either write me up or shut up, this isn't grade school, I'm not going to give you some cockamamie excuse, I'm f%!$ing late, that's all there is to it!
Anyway, he asked me why I was late. I looked at him and said "Because I got caught up in an online argument about postmodern literary theory."
He looked at me for a bit and then said, "Well, I've never heard that one before. Get to work, Doodlebug."
Yeah, f#+* you too, boss-man.
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Ah, "If the author is dead, why is the english teacher alive?". An old classic.
I was watching a crash course video on literature (because i really liked their history series)
To some, the failure to capitalize the "i" is simply a literary error. To the informed analyzer, though, we can tell that this grammatical stumble is, in reality, an ironic jab at the literary talent these so-called english teachers supposedly lack. It is here that we first see signs of BigNorseWolf's juvenile approach toward critique.
and one idea they had was that authorial intent doesn't matter, its the symbolic resonance that the reader gets from the reading that matters.
Many would mistake this for a simple explanation of what BigNorseWolf has seen, but note his use of the phrases "authorial intent" and "symbolic resonance". These are large, complex terms which will confuse—and therefore anger—the uneducated masses BigNorseWolf is appealing to.
But if this is true, then there should be no value in symbolism that you personally don't pick up on. If we're going to go existentialist, why does it matter if some literary critics and professors see that symbolism? Its hard to say that its objectively there if some people see it, some people don't, and the person who wrote the words somehow missed it.
BigNorseWolf has at this point abandoned any pretense and stooped to outright sarcasm, completely misrepresenting (and likely misunderstanding) the points made by people more educated than him and implying that they are saying the author simply "missed" his own symbolism.
Mild swearing diagram to illustrate the problem
"Illustrate" rhymes with "castrate", finally revealing BigNorseWolf's true purpose here: His fixation with male genitalia.
"Illustrate" rhymes with "castrate", finally revealing BigNorseWolf's true purpose here: His fixation with male genitalia.
Man, BeeNee (I just made that up, hope you don't mind), why didn't you just cut the crap and say so?
[Wiggles lasciviously]
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. The great thing about symbolism is that it can work even when you're not consciously interpreting it. Or when the author didn't intend it.That sounds very much like -that fluffy cloud looks like a bunny. It will be on the test tommorow, and you had better say its a bunny-
Why is one persons "I see the symbolism" deeper and more valid than another persons "I DON"T see the symbolism"
Nobody said it was.
Don't get upset about things people didn't say...
Hang on...
Hang on...
You're looking at clouds, seeing bunnies and then complaining about the bunnies as though they're real and important!
Hilarious. I love irony.
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I once saw a dragon in the clouds while I was over a co-worker's house smoking hashish. It was on all fours, ready to pounce, and then the wind blew the clouds, but the dragon didn't disappear, instead, it just shifted positon and crouched on its back legs.
I tried pointing it out to my brothers, but they just laughed at me.
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Most incomprehensible book that I've ever read without the benefit of a literature professor:
What's yours?
From Cuba with a Song by Serevo Sarduy.
I have it on good authority that it's BeeNee's favourite novel.
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Of course, no specific person in particular needs to read for deeper understanding. If you yourself think that Moby Dick is just a story about a fishing trip, and you enjoy it as such, have fun. But that doesn't eliminate the culture (both content and context) of the symbols in the book.I would argue that some of the layers of symbolism (past what the author either had in mind or clearly had on their mind while writing) aren't deep, they're bull. At some point its like reading tea leaves or looking at clouds and insisting that the shapes you see are actually there.
Can we put this on a t-shirt?
If I see the shape of a pig in a cloud and say, "Hey, that looks like a cloud." then BeeNee will pour scorn on me because...?
Nope, still don't understand why?
Unless you're implying that I have claimed it is a real pig, which I never would do.
Must just be the shape you impose on other people's statements... it's almost like you're disregarding authorial intent entirely and imposing your own interpretation on others' words: completely prioritising the reader's (your) interpretation over the writer/speaker's intent.
Wowser!