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Nobody said it was.
I think he did imply that. I suppose i could ask him if thats what he meant.
Don't get upset about things people didn't say...
More seriously, don't do that. Telling someone to "Calm down" when they're not remotely upset is both factually wrong and passive aggressive.
You're looking at clouds, seeing bunnies and then complaining about the bunnies as though they're real and important!
Hilarious. I love irony.
Its partially intentional. He can deny that the idea is there and say he knows that because he wrote it but that would be conceding the point.
Hey, BeeNee, I think this thread is going to suffer (if it hasn't already) from every poster flashbacking to their least favorite English teacher. You asked this question because Mr. Green is now doing a literature series. Are there any examples that have come up thus far? I only watched the episode(s?) on Homer.
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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.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.
This is just silly.
Read Richard II and explain how you can't see that Shakespeare is exploring the nature of identity?
“For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin”
“You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.”
“Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.”
He's not being subtle about being deep.
All of those solliloquys are deliberately, extravagantly reaching for depth and profundity.
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.
A quick bunch of clicking reveals that Senor Sarduy wrote a collection of essays about Barthes and Derrida. No wonder it was incomprehensible.
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This is just silly.
No, this is.
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Nobody said it was.
I think he did imply that. I suppose i could ask him if thats what he meant.
Don't get upset about things people didn't say...More seriously, don't do that. Telling someone to "Calm down" when they're not remotely upset is both factually wrong and passive aggressive.
Its partially intentional. He can deny that the idea is there and say he knows that because he wrote it but that would be conceding the point.You're looking at clouds, seeing bunnies and then complaining about the bunnies as though they're real and important!
Hilarious. I love irony.
The thing is...
The OP is almost a case of two reductio ad absurdum arguments staring each other down.
Is it absurd to deny reader intent? Yes.
Is it absurd to dismiss all unintended symbolism? Yes.
I'm moderately intelligent and fairly well-educated, and that's probably me being egotistical, but it all seems pretty obvious to me. And it seems to be what most people on this thread are saying.
Happily, most people see this as an opportunity to expand on and explore tangents from the initial idea absurdity.
Huzzar! for human enthusiasm.
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No, this is.This is just silly.
No, that's great art which explores the obsessive nature of desire. You're just reading it wrong.
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GAH
I KNEW MY ENGLISH-PROFESSOR-MOCKERY WOULD HAVE CONSEQUENCES
BUT THIS IS A BITTER ONE INDEED
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Man, I'm so upset I can't find that scene from Heathers where Christian Slater underlines "Eskimo" in one of the dead girl's copies of Moby Dick.
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?
I'm sorry if I'm missing the obvious sense, but on what matter? If you mean how one should interpret a given text, nothing, intrinsically. Ideally, anyone who makes a compelling case that something is interesting should be heard. Practically, of course, there are all sorts of class issues bound up in what is considered sufficiently interesting for the academy, but the point of my example is that the mainstream view of criticism has shifted to be more accessible, in some ways. One doesn't necessarily need to know that a word has a very specific flavour in this author, or all the ins and outs of the slang of that one's period, much as those details may reveal interesting things, to be able to produce a nuanced reading of a text based on what continuities there are in the language. Before New Criticism, a lot of criticism was based on a philological ideal which was ostensibly objective and required a much broader grounding in the canon than many students in later cohorts had. It doesn't necessarily have to be GIs; it could be students from other fields who have to take an arts elective without the background of students that have had their hearts set on studying literature since forever, or it could be freshmen from an increasingly wider variety of academic backgrounds. The death of the author was almost required to give some of them a foot in the door.
Now, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it's a daunting problem as far as I can see. Unless we can completely eradicate class consciousness (unlikely, because if a teacher can't distinguish a more compelling argument from a less better than a new student, what are they doing teaching?), there has to be some price of admission, like lip service to what contemporary society finds officially interesting. If we distrust the self-serving hifalutin tastes of academics as such, we still have the problem that the bestseller lists are full of acknowledged drivel, and more complicatedly, middle-of-the-road stuff shaped by a blend of what is just sophisticated enough and doesn't challenge the values of the status quo. What can we all agree is worth talking about? If a lot of lit majors want to read more contemporary literature, who gets to choose what's good enough? On the other hand, if we decide that the right way to go about things is to wait a couple of hundred years, what's likely to have survived is what was popular and that powerful people and people who wanted to be like them liked.
I'm also glad someone else has picked up on the whole New Criticism thingie.
'Cuz I was having a hard time picturing all my old high school English teachers studying postmodernism.
Except for Mr. Holding, who used to wheel in a television set and make us watch video cassettes of Camille Paglia interviews.
Or Mrs. Wolflein, who was once featured in Playboy (not a pictorial, alas) after a Christian Coalition parent had filed suit against the town because she was teaching something he didn't like.
Or maybe Mr. Horton who was in the Weather Underground back in the day. Yeah, I know, he was a history teacher, but he used to teach the interdisciplinary "Humanities" sophomore course with Mrs. Danos, whom, I'm sure, had never heard of postmodernism in her life.
Oh yeah, school sucks.
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).
*Screams inwardly with the remembered pain of doing the same thing with Catcher in the Rye*
If any of my undergrad profs had made me read the same book six times in a course, I would have demanded my money back, physically assaulted them, or maybe both.
Most incomprehensible book that I've ever read without the benefit of a literature professor:
What's yours?
Next question:
Favorite book you never would've read if it hadn't been for that one college course (or high school if you've never been to college)?
Mine: Mama Day by Gloria Naylor.
(Man, if that Good Reads page is to be believed, a lotta hawt chicks dig Mama Day.)
If any of my undergrad profs had made me read the same book six times in a course, I would have demanded my money back, physically assaulted them, or maybe both.
Well to be fair (maybe?) this was my 10th grade AP Lit class so at least I wasn't PAYING for it.
Hmm. Well, I suppose you could always cut class and smoke a doob behind the dumpster.
By the way, Holden Caulfield thinks you're phony.
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Interestingly, Crash Course has thus far made an episode about three-fourths of the books and/or authors mentioned in this thread.
Oddly enough, though, I don't see one for Moby Dick which I don't believe for a second wasn't intended to be f*@%ing loaded with symbolism. Melville was always hanging offa Hawthorne's jock. They loved that shiznit.
Hmmm, should I rant about Gatsby and the green light? F%#% that shiznit, the eyes of Dr. T.J. Mecklenberg, mofo!!!
Sorry, I'll just watch this Crash Course episode on...hmmm, either Slaughterhouse-Five or Jane Eyre, I haven't decided...
I actually decided for Beloved and then had to run back in here and report that he's got a copy of Titus Groan on his desk for a prop.
Huzzah!
Huzzah indeed! I loved Gormenghast, but I haven't got around to reading Titus Alone yet. I may have to move it up on my shelf of books to read. I have a bad habit of not finishing series.
I'd have to think a bit to pick a favourite book that I would never have read if it hadn't been for that one course... I do have a favourite book I love to hate because of one course, though. We had to read Brave New World one year in high school; I had already read it, and other people in the class kept complaining how hard it was, until our teacher agreed to take it off the list of readings we'd be responsible for for the final exam. I read it over and over again out of spite in the meantime, and wrote about it for my final anyway.
Huzzah!
Titus Alone, of course, is very unsatisfying because poor Mervyn never finished it due to Parkinson's (?--something).
:(
BNW (no, not you, BeeNee): It reminds me, though, that by the time Mrs. Wolflein assigned Cat's Cradle the penultimate year of high school, I had already read it something like three times. So, I refused to read it for class. School sucks!
Oh yeah, I might have had to take Junior English over again...
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This is just silly.
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.
It's also just wrong. With specific regard to Moby Dick, we have the author's contemporary letters (to Hawthorne, among others) indicating that he's very aware of the symbolic nature of the book.
While it may also be true that the book had its basis in an actual whaling journal, it's the "fictionalization" process that creates the symbolisms and gives the book its specific theme. In a similar fashion, I could retell the events of the Apollo 13 mission and fictionalize it to be a tale of hubris involving secrets-Man-was-not-meant-to-know, or I could turn it into a a love story about Lovell and his wife and how her love sustained him in the face of what could have become the loneliest death in the history of mankind, a tragic tale of desire frustrated as Lovell never got a chance to walk on the moon, or even a heroic story of technical triumph in the face of adversity. (The film, of course, took the fourth approach.)
Call me Doodlebug.
To be clear, although I also believe that Moby Dick was intended to be f&&~ing loaded with symbolism, I have no idea what all that symbolism symbolizes, even after listening to four lectures about it on some Great College Courses audiocassette series that I found in the Nashua Public Library's free bin.
To be clear, although I also believe that Moby Dick was intended to be f+~#ing loaded with symbolism, I have no idea what all that symbolism symbolizes, even after listening to four lectures about it on some Great College Courses audiocassette series that I found in the Nashua Public Library's free bin.
I'm not sure that anyone does. The Melville letters aren't that explicit, and, of course, there's a lot of unconscious symbolism-by-cultural-association that Melville himself might not have been explicit about (or even aware of).
However, I'm also not sure that the Nashua Public Library's audiocassettes are the be-all and end-all of Melville scholarship. I'm fairly certain, for example, that at least one journal article has been published on the topic, and reading it might provide you with further insights, even if only the insight that you disagree with the journal author (and the incentive to re-read the text to find out why and what evidence you can amass to support your opinion).
Mervyn Peake had a stroke which left him in pretty bad shape, I thought...
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Yet these
Those unfledged
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Of man's aboard in hast entrance censure aboard thy and to but for memory
See their a reserve shame thou adoption quarrel thy
The character tried but judgment wind Give
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Bear't habit the no thy that as shoulder tongue soul the thy of
Nor with opposed purse your any hoops may can sail unproportioned of beware buy
And thought steel of 70
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Give express'd stay'd 60
Be not every in for thou dull man fancy There familiar thy thy rich my but palm ear not blessing by with but gaudy with no entertainment
Of few thee means each thy
And vulgar new-hatch'd voice
Hamlet in the Bill Burroughs cutup machine
Marry you so tell honour well and as you
What bethought you so
You is 90
'Tis yourself
Have 'tis do between told of put not you? me your on understand give he audience me yourself me hath been
And so up very most that clearly
As the oft free in it truth of and way behoves late
Given bounteous of my private
If caution daughter time it I and to be must your
There. I've reversed the toilet paper's direction. I also decided to break up all the individual squares and glue them back together with catgut.
Blessed be the copy paste function.
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Cards against the humanities?
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Cards against the humanities?
Hah, you could even put a Moby Dick card in there.
Don't really feel like wading into the thick of a discussion but I do have some interesting (to me) things to say about the subject.
1) In modern days, communication between authors and their readership is much, much faster than it ever was in history. The constant overwhelming feedback might have an interesting effect on the whole "is a book what the author intended or what the reader understood" issue. I'm not sure what the impact will be, but I feel like it's going to change the viewpoint on the matter.
2) While 95% of the literature analysis to be found almost everywhere is complete nonsense, that doesn't mean analyzing books is not possible or interesting, especially if the author consciously wrote a book in a way that's meant to be analyzed to be understood. Then it becomes like somewhat of a puzzle - a riddle for those who are interested to attempt to solve it. If you forgo the "there are no wrong answers" foolishness and replace it with "figuring out the right answers is hard" you'll get an actual field of study. Again, by it's nature literature draws the kind of people who like to make wild and unbased theories about stuff - they feel like they are very spiritual or whatever. However, I'm sure some of the people who study the field would be able to convince even the biggest of wolves that there are valid things to say about certain books. Whether that's interesting or not is a more subjective issue (to me, it is not)
Books books books. I sure do love books. In fact, if you people wanted to get me to stop politrolling, you would all post in the Good Books thread everyday. Well, cut down on the politrolling, anyway.
I was at work one time, reading Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus I think, or maybe it was Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as Narrated by Herself when one of my union brothers said to me, "You really like reading, huh?" Yeah, I do. He then went on to tell me that he had only ever read three books in his entire life, which was sad but it got worse, because the last one he read was some book--I forget the title--by John Grisham and it was really, really good, and he talked to me about it for the rest of break and I wanted to cry and hug him, but of course I didn't because he would have punched me.
Lessee...
1) Earlier today I was thinking that I would have to come back and change my answer to the last question, because I think I liked Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum much more than Mama Day (and, if I don't, then the fact that the second time I read it I was paralyzed with depression, lying in my bed for a week, 30 years old and a total f#$! up and here I was reading a book about a 30 year old who was a total f&!* up, well, it didn't really help my mental condition, but it sure was a bonding experience with Oskar). But, anyway, happily, I remembered that we read that in a literature course taught by a professor from the German department (which was kind of a trip, the poor guy obviously wanted to be a literature professor, spouting off about opera and Brecht and Wim Wenders, but he was stuck teaching Boston working-class kids how to conjugate verbs) so Mama Day still counts.
2) Madame Sissyl, I looked it up and I already forgot, but it poor Mr. Peake had dementia with loweries(?).
3) Yes, Citizen Quest, I realize Nashua ain't quite the cultural capital of the universe, no need to rub it in (F@~~ you, Kerouac was born here!*).
One book that I can recommend to the class is Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In by C.L.R. James, the Afro-Carribbean Marxist (who also wrote the classic study of Touusaint L'Ouverture, The Black Jacobins) who wrote it while he was being held for deportation, IIRC.
I can't entirely vouch for the credibility of James's reading of MD as a study of the rottenness of capitalist American democracy, but it's quite a fascinating read. One of the above posters (Comrade Ray? Citizen K(e)rensky? Qunnessa?) was talking about looking at how books affect readers, and the transcription of how Moby Dick affected a brilliant black communist adrift in the early years of the Cold War, is, well, as I said, fascinating.
4) I don't really have anything to say about William S. Burroughs, but all this nostalgic reflection of my school days reminded me of when I read Allen Ginsberg poems about gay sex and Lawrence Felinghetti ditties about dogs peeing on police officers for Poetry Day in the school auditorium.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the Right Wing has a point about public education.
---
*Woops; he, of course wasn't; he was born in Lowell, I don't know what came over me.
"is a book what the author intended or what the reader understood"
My point is a little more complicated than that.
Either A) what the author intended or B) What the reader understood are both legitimate (if somewhat subjective) arguments. What strikes me as self contradictory is What the author intended, is that the insistance that what the author didn't intend, what Reader 1 saw and what reader 2 didn't has enough objective value to itself be the subject of books, courses, and more time spent in English class than actual reading.
At high school and above, BeeNee, you should be doing the readings outside of class.
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So, I polished off The Other America, read "The Adventure of the Red Headed League" and then pulled Gatsby off the shelf.
I skipped to the end.
"And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity behind the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning----
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
I don't know. Seems to me like "what does the green light represent?" is a fair, though not very interesting, question for millions of English teachers--either trained in New Criticism or postmodernism, it doesn't matter--to pester generations of school children with.
One of my longer posts on this page, rendered in cut-ups:
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forget a cultural affect
1) Earlier today I was thinking that I would have to come back and change my answer to the last question
Aaargh! I didn't specify "English course" in the question above. I do have to change my answer.
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Double aaargh! It's "Dr T.J. Eckleburg" not Mecklenberg, which is (almost) a region in Germany.
"is a book what the author intended or what the reader understood"My point is a little more complicated than that.
Either A) what the author intended or B) What the reader understood are both legitimate (if somewhat subjective) arguments. What strikes me as self contradictory is What the author intended, is that the insistance that what the author didn't intend, what Reader 1 saw and what reader 2 didn't has enough objective value to itself be the subject of books, courses, and more time spent in English class than actual reading.
I understand where you're coming from, BNW, but in the end, I think it comes down to a similar argument to what gets made with RP playstyles. There are people who like their literature plainspoken and fun, and there are those who enjoy their literature cryptic and needing to be decoded. There are those who believe Authorial Intent is supreme, and those who believe Reader Response is all that matters.
Where we run into problems is when one group accuses one of the others of having BadWrongFun in their choice of reading. I am a literary omnivore, but I have been openly mocked in a Literature class for daring to make known that I read literature that wasn't "literary" enough, and I have had other not-so-academic acquaintances poke fun at me for reading anything other than the latest best-selling potboiler.
If someone wants to spend all their time discussing Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories, let them follow their bliss. If someone else just wants to see if Catherine and Heathcliff finally get it together, that's OK too. As for me, I'm just glad when I get students who are voluntarily reading something deeper than a Facebook post. Someday I'll win the lottery I never play and be able to built that library you see in the background in Beauty and the Beast.
EDIT: Dang, DA, you were busy while I was lazily pulling my thoughts together! Where did you learn to sound like Joyce in Finnegan's Wake?
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Pfft, Joyce. I got to "When you wet the bed first it is warm and then it is cold" and I was, like, you don't have to tell me, Jimmy.
There are those who believe Authorial Intent is supreme, and those who believe Reader Response is all that matters.
It goes further than that. Only SOME of the reader response is valid because only some of it is seeing something that is (allegedly) actually there. Its like saying that MY role play is great, but everyone elses is junk.
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"is a book what the author intended or what the reader understood"My point is a little more complicated than that.
Either A) what the author intended or B) What the reader understood are both legitimate (if somewhat subjective) arguments. What strikes me as self contradictory is What the author intended, is that the insistance that what the author didn't intend, what Reader 1 saw and what reader 2 didn't has enough objective value to itself be the subject of books, courses, and more time spent in English class than actual reading.
Wait till you get to philosophy, which does the same thing, except for our universe instead of a book. For them, there isn't even an author to not intend what they think ;)
The solution to what bothers you is very simple, I think - some people enjoy doing that kind of thing, and social consensus elevates that particular hobby to what is considered an academic field. And, as I mentioned before, just because 95% of that kind of research is pure crud doesn't mean that there's nothing to be found there. I'm sure some of the lit. people are actually intelligent and grounded in reality and actually write very convincing interpretations of books. It's not impossible to make this kind of thing meaningful, it's just hard so most of the time people fail at it (but claim to succeed).
Oh, great, get him started on philosophy, too...
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Oh, great, get him started on philosophy, too...
*chuckle* I think you've seen THAT rant.
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Either A) what the author intended or B) What the reader understood are both legitimate (if somewhat subjective) arguments. What strikes me as self contradictory is What the author intended, is that the insistance that what the author didn't intend, what Reader 1 saw and what reader 2 didn't has enough objective value to itself be the subject of books, courses, and more time spent in English class than actual reading.
You're not allowing for the role of scholarship, analysis and consensus.
An appropriate question to ask both reader 1 and reader 2 is "why do you believe what you saw is important?" If Reader 1 has a sensible and consistent answer that is supported by evidence of some sort and that has explanatory capacity for something else, it's appropriate to take her seriously. If Reader 2 simply says "just 'cause," it's also appropriate to take her less seriously, perhaps to dismiss her outright.
Fortunately, Reader 3, who read both of those opinions during the course of her Ph.D., is in a position to make that judgment, and part of her job as faculty is to help teach students the difference, in part by summarizing the two opinions and offering help in looking at the foundations of the two. (And this will also help the students both understand what they need to look for when producing their own interpretations, and also help them evaluate Reader 8 several years hence; if she's just as bad as Reader 2, they will recognize it and take appropriate judgment).
That's how scholarship works in general. It's not confined to the humanities. When the NSF gives grants, when Springer reviews a book, or when AAAS is selecting papers, part of the selection process is to look at the underlying arguments the scientists give about why their particular line of reasoning holds. If a scientist is totally unfamiliar with a major line of scholarship, especially one that directly contradicts the theory they hold, then their work will not be supported. That's basically "peer review."
First-year undergraduate students typically can't participate in peer review, because they're not peers(*) -- they don't know enough about the material in question, and usually don't know enough about the relevant epistemological standards. And precisely because the students in English class are expected to be able to read all by themselves, they can go home and do the actual reading, while class time can be devoted to discussion of the material (that they've read for themselves) and a critical analysis to illustrate exactly why Reader 2's opinion is not sensible, not consistent, not supported, or not explanatory.
Basically, Melville scholarship (to use an example), is a huge field and I, personally, don't have time to read everything that's been published in it. I do know a little bit -- enough to know, for example, that the earlier statement that "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" is simply wrong and is directly contradicted by Melville's other works. But I can also very efficiently learn about Melville by well-vetted secondary sources that have already already sorted that particular chaff from the wheat.
Case in point, "Jay Gatsby was black." Even other English scholars consider this ridiculous:
Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli has one answer. “Because it’s mishigas! If Fitzgerald wanted to write about blacks, it wouldn’t have taken 75 years to figure it out. If that’s what Fitzgerald wanted, he would have made it perfectly clear in April 1925. Great works of literature are not fodder for guessing games. This kind of thing is bad for literature, bad for Fitzgerald, bad for ‘The Great Gatsby’ and bad for students who get exposed to this kind of guessing game.”
“It’s the literary equivalent of the Rorschach blots. People just want to read into classics something original and new and totally divorced from the authors’ intentions,” says Charles Scribner III of Thompson’s idea. His family’s firm, Charles Scribner’s Sons, was Fitzgerald’s publisher. “I mean, it’s ridiculous. There’s nothing in Fitzgerald’s documentation, in the drafts, in his letters back and forth to the editor, Max Perkins, that would give any credence to such an interpretation of ‘The Great Gatsby.’”
If you want to read Gatsby yourself, as well as the supporting documentation Scribner suggests and make up your own mind, go for it. Or you can take the word of a number of experts who have already done the reading. But if you've not done the secondary reading, there's not much value in your personal opinion; there's too much evidence that you don't know about.
(*) That's a well-known weakness with law reviews. Law reviews are edited by law students, not lawyers, and as a result, a lot of "articles are published that have no merit at all," precisely because the law students aren't familiar with the material under discussion.
There are those who believe Authorial Intent is supreme, and those who believe Reader Response is all that matters.It goes further than that. Only SOME of the reader response is valid because only some of it is seeing something that is (allegedly) actually there. Its like saying that MY role play is great, but everyone elses is junk.
Well, again, I think it depends on what people think criticism should be doing. If one’s interested in what readers now are seeing in a given text, what they see is what one has to work with. However, that doesn’t mean one has to agree that they’re focusing on the right things and putting them together in the right way. At that point, though, the argument has to become rhetorical, barring egregious errors (they were in a hurry and skipped what happened on p. 124 entirely, say), because they do see what they see, and one has to argue that one’s own interpretation is preferable for X, Y, and Z reasons. In the roleplaying analogy, one can, I think, argue that one person’s roleplaying is better than another’s, based on the interests of a given group. If it’s important to the group that someone develop a consistent character and work within the setting material, it’s at least arguable that one person’s character feels more like a real personality, or that they feel more like an elf/dwarf/whatever as presented in the setting. In the world of criticism, who gets to decide what makes for the equivalent of “good roleplaying” may be problematic, but I don’t think there’s a problem in principle. Some people work better together than others.
Alternatively, and this is getting back to author intention, if one’s interested in how an earlier work was received by its original audience, there are other questions to ask. Can we tell that the author had a particular idea in mind in publishing the work? Could that word have that connotation at that time? Things can get a bit tricky, though. Maybe the author always used that word in a particular sense across their works, but were they read by enough people that most people would have picked up on it? Maybe the author kept notes for themselves (this is what’s going on: say it this way), but did anyone else see those notes? Did the author respond to a review to clarify what they were doing? Intention is important to a point, but sometimes one gets to where the impact of their work has to be judged by one's best guess of what their audience could be thinking, reader response. It can be historicized (Victorian folks would probably have understood this to mean X, because of how it was used in A, B, and C, which were extremely popular based on the records of their printings…), but there it is.
Lastly, everyone’s favourite lit. whipping boy, Shakespeare, might be a useful example. It’s been a while, but I don’t think there’s much evidence at all that he saw himself or was seen in his own time as much more than a talented hack. His intention? To pay the bills, and his way of doing that was to write the sort of thing that would keep the punters coming back to the Globe every season. But, after he died, some of his old theatre buddies decided that he was actually a pretty cool guy and his plays were neat, so they collected them as best they could… And at some point, Shakespeare becomes vastly important to English literary culture, and in later periods one can’t simply ignore that just because he never intended it, and one should be able to ask why we keep coming back to him. (Although the answer may be, in part, "Because our English teachers make us.")
Also, ninja’ed very elegantly by Orfamay Quest!
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I understand where you're coming from, BNW, but in the end, I think it comes down to a similar argument to what gets made with RP playstyles. There are people who like their literature plainspoken and fun, and there are those who enjoy their literature cryptic and needing to be decoded. There are those who believe Authorial Intent is supreme, and those who believe Reader Response is all that matters.
That's an issue, but there's also the issue of quality of scholarship (which I think is actually what grinds BNW's gears). If Authorial Intent is supreme, how do you know when you found it?
From C.S. Lewis' Fern-seed and Elephants:
All this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the texts it studies; what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences - the whole Sitz im Leben of the text. This is done with immense erudition and great ingenuity. And at first sight it is very convincing. I think I should be convinced by it myself, but that I carry about with me a charm - the herb moly - against it. You must excuse me if I now speak for a while of myself. The value of what I say depends on its being first-hand evidence.[...]
My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a record of 100 per cent failure. You would expect that by mere chance they would hit as often as the miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can't remember a single hit. But as I have not kept a careful record my mere impression may be mistaken. What I think I can say with certainty is that they are usually wrong.
And yet they would often sound - if you didn't know the truth - extremely convincing. Many reviewers suggested that the Ring in Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings was suggested by the atom bomb. What could be more plausible. Here is a book published when everyone was preoccupied by that sinister invention; here in the centre of the book is a weapon which is seems madness to throw away yet fatal to use. Yet in fact, the chronology of the book's composition make the theory impossible. Only the other week a reviewer said that a fairy-tale by my friend Roger Lancelyn Green was influenced by fairy-tales of mine. Nothing could be more probable. I have an imaginary country with a beneficent lion in it; Green, one with a beneficent tiger. Green and I can be proved to read one another's works; to be indeed in various ways closely associated. The case for an affiliation is far stronger than many which we accept as conclusive when dead authors are concerned. But it's all untrue nevertheless. I know the genesis of that Tiger and that Lion and they are quite independent.
This raises several possibilities, none of them comfortable. The first is that Lewis himself is wrong and the anonymous critic knows Green's work (and mind) better than Lewis does despite personal friendship. The second is that the reviewer is wrong. A detailed analysis of Green's other work, including perhaps drafts and personal correspondence, might be able to settle the difference.
But this puts the problem back in the laps of the professional scholars, who have time to go through Green's wastebasket and filing cabinet and do the necessary close reading.
I could make a similar argument about Reader Response -- how do you know what Reader Response is? The general answer is that it's not necessarily how you-as-an-individual respond, but how people in general do.... and unless you've read widely enough to know how people in general respond, we're back in the hands of the professionals who have.
And part of the process of professionalism is the usual amount of training as well as the various disputes among different theories to sort out which one really does make sense.
Well, again, I think it depends on what people think criticism should be doing. If one’s interested in what readers now are seeing in a given text, what they see is what one has to work with.There are those who believe Authorial Intent is supreme, and those who believe Reader Response is all that matters.It goes further than that. Only SOME of the reader response is valid because only some of it is seeing something that is (allegedly) actually there. Its like saying that MY role play is great, but everyone elses is junk.
Just be careful not to confuse yourself for Everyman.
What you see isn't what "readers" see. One of the easiest and best way to learn what others have seen is to read what they have written on the topic, e.g. the secondary scholarship.
What's the RLG series featuring the beneficent Tiger? I don't know that one.