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Mel Mudkiper posted:no it isnt Now who's hidebound by authorial intent, hrm?
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Mar 20, 2019 15:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Now who's hidebound by authorial intent thats not what that means!
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Mar 20, 2019 15:53
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Mel Mudkiper posted:thats not what that means!
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Mar 20, 2019 16:02
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Now who's hidebound by authorial intent, hrm? loled
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Mar 20, 2019 17:01
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Thank you all for the responses!!!
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Mar 20, 2019 17:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:no it isnt so whats the problem
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Mar 20, 2019 17:05
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I'm gonna go out of a limb here and say that you waste yourself arguing against someone defending Death of the Author if that person has a poorly understanding of Death of the Author. I mean, the text starts by separating the authorial voice and the IRL person doing the writing, it's less about what opinions the IRL author has and more about understanding the "author" as a character in a text. Pierre Menard and Library of Babel are good examples and I also propose The Name of the Rose since the main story is a text, that's probably fake, found by not-Umberto Eco. Another excellent example is Lord of the Rings since the main text is a story taken from the Red Books and then transliterated to English by not-Tolkien. One of the fun things I liked reading in the Lost Tales of Middle-Earth is that the famous Beren and Luthien poem was written by some bard in the 4th Age or something so it kinda drives the point about how the whole Middle Earth Mythos has been shaped by narrators and coloured by their context, the same way Arthurian Legend has. That's worldbuilding
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Mar 20, 2019 18:14
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Pacho posted:it's less about what opinions the IRL author has and more about understanding the "author" as a character in a text. that is explicitly not what the essay is about
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Mar 20, 2019 18:32
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I care what the author has to say and for their wellbeing, please don't die Author
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Mar 20, 2019 19:33
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More central critical doctrines should be based on puns.
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Mar 20, 2019 19:40
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Mel Mudkiper posted:that is explicitly not what the essay is about Uh, I expressed myself wrong, I was talking about the introduction: Barthes posted:In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this And how at most you can discern an "authorial voice" but this "author" is a semiotic construct that depends on the text. My point is that a lot of people have politicized(?) Death of the Author conflating it with "separation of art and artist" or even weirder stuff, and other people strike back at this misunderstood idea of Death of the Author, which is the impression I got from the last page
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Mar 20, 2019 20:04
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I asked a few of my book nerd friends for some intro recommendations for the thread and The Johns Hopkins guide was suggested as a good primer to get a person started. https://litguide.press.jhu.edu It is subscription locked for $100 a year, but you should be able to access it at your local library. Not terribly convenient, however I am led to believe it is a very thorough primer with excellent sourcing and follow up material. I won't be able to take a look until the weekend but if I get a chance I will report back on it's quality.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:29
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Perhaps I'd be more appreciative of this "toolset" if you gave me examples of its tools and how they can be meaningfully put to use. I can't make head or tail of what you're arguing for here. "Entertainment value" is something that you say is inherent to a work, but as far as you've been discussing it, it seems functionally indistinguishable from commercial performance; assessing it is simply market analysis. Thought I'd jump back and answer this, thread being slow right now. At the time I was thinking in terms of books on story and technique written by people in the professions I mentioned and by successful (in the popularity sense) writers, things like Syd Field, say. But this week I've finally gotten around to starting to read Northrop Frye, and am halfway through The Secular Scripture (Thanks, thread, for the impetus to get around to that. I'm finding quite accessable, to reference that question), with the Anatomy queued up behind, and I'm going to say that Frye's approach is the sort of thing I'm talking about. He has better-articulated versions of the points I've been trying to make, like the continuity of the genres with much earlier romances. (His Romance/Realism divide is more fruitful than my Fantastical/not Fantastical one, to be sure.)
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Mar 22, 2019 15:42
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Thranguy posted:I've finally gotten around to starting to read Northrop Frye, Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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Mar 22, 2019 16:02
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo The Anatomy of Criticism is real good for the bit on the "anatomy" or Menippean satire (I think it's the fourth essay), even if it only marginally develops most of Bakhtin's ideas on the subject. e: To be clear, the rest of the book struck me as mystical reactionary nonsense, but the specific section I'm talking about helped me a lot once upon a time. Eugene V. Dubstep fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Mar 22, 2019 |
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Mar 22, 2019 17:21
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:The Anatomy of Criticism is real good for the bit on the "anatomy" or Menippean satire (I think it's the fourth essay), even if it only marginally develops most of Bakhtin's ideas on the subject. e: To be clear, the rest of the book struck me as mystical reactionary nonsense, but the specific section I'm talking about helped me a lot once upon a time. Oh yeah I find his analyses fascinating but unfortunatit's all framed in a doomed and foolish endeavor to materialize the ethereal
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Mar 22, 2019 17:47
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Oh yeah I find his analyses fascinating but unfortunatit's all framed in a doomed and foolish endeavor to materialize the ethereal The literary theory I find most sensible is often just a more eloquent or idiomatic restatement of a few already famous Romantic works: Biographia Literaria, Knocking at the Gate, the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, the bit of The Genius of Christianity on the vague des passions. For a biased but mostly correct critical foundation, I've always felt you could do worse than read those, Locke's theory of consciousness, the Philosophical Investigations, and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction before chasing whatever thread you like.
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Mar 22, 2019 18:49
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remember when we had a thread like this and it was fun
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Apr 6, 2019 18:15
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remember fun?
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Apr 6, 2019 18:17
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I'm the fun dragon
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Apr 6, 2019 18:35
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Can an acorn be fun?
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Apr 6, 2019 19:00
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The thread can be fun. It just needs content in it, instead of complaining.
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Apr 6, 2019 19:17
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I started reading Martha Wells Element of Fire because the sci fi thread loves her Murderbot stories. Second page and I’ve run into the sentence “Thomas personally couldn’t think of a good time to forcibly invade a foreign sorcerers house.” What are the words “personally” and “forcibly” adding to that sentence that the rest of it isn’t implying? It just impedes the flow.
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Apr 6, 2019 19:25
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Flesnolk posted:The thread can be fun. Complaining can be content
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Apr 6, 2019 20:12
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Ccs posted:I started reading Martha Wells Element of Fire because the sci fi thread loves her Murderbot stories. Second page and I’ve run into the sentence “Thomas personally couldn’t think of a good time to forcibly invade a foreign sorcerers house.” the "forcibly" should have been forcibly removed by an editor. the "personally" was probably supposed to have some function of comedic understatement, but was placed in the worst spot imaginable. for example, something like "Personally, Thomas couldn't think of a good time to invade a foreign sorcerer's house" would be a lot better already. (also was the lack of apostrophe present in the original or is that your mistake?)
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Apr 6, 2019 20:17
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chernobyl kinsman posted:remember when we had a thread like this and it was fun they got what they wanted
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Apr 6, 2019 21:08
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Mel Mudkiper posted:they got what they wanted yea
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Apr 6, 2019 22:31
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AMAB
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Apr 6, 2019 23:50
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11312
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Apr 7, 2019 00:05
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what the hell is happening to this thread?
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Apr 7, 2019 00:12
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Sometimes, you don't get a nice and tidy ending where the hero rides off into marriage/retirement/absolution. No rewards given out to the good and punishments to the bad. Sometimes, it's just silence.
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Apr 7, 2019 00:17
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Lex Neville posted:11312 17776 actually that is serious, go read it now
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Apr 7, 2019 01:26
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Bilirubin posted:17776 i have read this. it is amazing
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Apr 7, 2019 01:28
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Apr 7, 2019 07:13
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I could still do that piece on how Sanderson religions don't actually provide answers and just hand out superpowers I guess.
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Apr 7, 2019 22:52
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yes please!
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Apr 7, 2019 22:57
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I could still do that piece on how Sanderson religions don't actually provide answers and just hand out superpowers I guess. so like mormonism then
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Apr 8, 2019 00:21
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Sanderson's Worldbuilding and the Great Lack of Answers Since ancient times people have turned to religion to answer important questions. How should we behave? What happens after death? What does existence mean? These are questions which get answered in tales of gods and miracles. Brandon Sanderson writes many tales of gods and miracles, yet none of the characters seek any answers from the gods. Divinity is solely important for handing out cool powers to whomever can meet the prerequisites. Disclaimer: I am missing most of my Sanderson books due to my housing situation, so this is mostly from memory. I will also sadly have to discuss the magic systems as these unfortunately pertain to our theme. Mistborn posted:"Tell me about another one, Saze," Kelsier said. "One with power." Some context is in order. The character speaking is Sazed, a scholar of religion trying to figure out what people believed before the evil Lord Ruler took over, declared himself God-king and pissed off all the protagonists. In any other novel this would be a search for meaning, but here it's an aside which almost reads as satire. It's completely absurd to end every sentence with "Praise the Ja", but we are told in the next paragraph that these people fought openly long after nations and armies were conquered for their right to praise the Ja. This is not helped by Sazed later claiming he believes in them all yet mix and matching prayers to suit the occasion. The other relationships between gods and men are part of "the Cosmere", and here's where things get obnoxious and tricky. There once was a god called Adonalsium. He got murdered and split into sixteen parts which can be stolen by mortals to make them gods. Now, looking at the wiki entry most of the info on Big A is from author signings so good luck getting any of this from the text. This ties back to the Mistborn trilogy because the characters are fighting over two of these shards, Ruin and Preservation - which grant identical powers but mess with your mind and blah blah blah blah. Now you might ask what role these shards play in the universe, I'll let the Brandon Sanderson wiki answer you. wiki posted:Adonalsium is a mysterious being or force in the cosmere from which all Investiture[magic powers] is derived. That's the first sentence of the Adonalsoum article, and generally it holds true throughout Mistborn. The powers the characters wield turn out to be from one of the two gods, they even eat Preservation's flesh for more power to oppose Ruin, and the ending of the trilogy is Sazed getting the power of both gods to reshape the planet. At no point so the characters grapple with the knowledge that gods are real. They're either power ups or the final boss. This also raises the question of a world where God is dead, yet this is never answered with respect to Adonalsium. It's a major issue in The Stormlight Archive and that's where we look next. The Way of Kings posted:"I wish I could do more," repeated the figure in gold. "You might be able to get him to choose a champion. He is bound by some rules. All of us are. A champion could work well for you, but it is not certain. And...without the Dawnshards...Well, I have done what I can. It is a terrible, terrible thing to leave you alone." This is the big plot twist after Dalinar has spent the entire book receiving visions to unite the land against the evil god Odium. This god, unlike Ruin and Preservation, has actual precepts to follow, but they only matter if you are receiving power. Kaladin, one of the protagonists, has an entire arc in Words of Radiance about losing power from violating the precepts, only to gain it back on saying the final line of the oath. There is a church of the Almighty, but it mostly exists to reinforce the weird racism analog and yell at atheists who can use the power of God. It is never presented as something worth believing in or even something characters would willingly follow. It's just there, sandwiched between pages on chasmfiends and other worldbuilding dreck. The worst part is that this could be an excellent premise if handled right. God is dead, and no one will judge you. What would this world look like? As it stands, put these books down and go read Cormack McCarthy's The Road instead. It's much better at examining this idea than this asasine power drivel. Postscript: Nerds and 'canon' A big problem with a lot of these fantasy franchises is the sheer amount of dumb bullshit you have to wade through outside the text. From JK Rowling's insistence that Dumbledore is gay (despite this being nowhere in the books) to Adonalsium's backstory being eagerly reported to the internet by people at book signings there is a bunch of important thematic information that cannot be derived from the books. Yet fans will insist that the authors' ramblings should be considered an integral part of the text in which they are not present, and it baffles me.
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Apr 8, 2019 02:19
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It’s been a while since I read any Stormlight but how can big G God get killed by Odium if Odium is one of his shards?
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Apr 8, 2019 02:37
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It's not big G God, it's the "honor" shard.
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Apr 8, 2019 02:45
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