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Not to step too far away from the current discussion, but those excerpt from DODO had me wondering: are there iconic instances of books where the prose is subjectively "bad" by technical or widely accepted aesthetic standards, but work in favor of the thematic "goal" of the book, and succeed in creating an artistic whole? Maybe that's a dumb question, and admittedly I don't know that I have the literary vocabulary to express my question any better, but hopefully I got across what I'm asking.
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Mar 17, 2019 04:14
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Tim Burns Effect posted:do you mean something like "Flowers for Algernon"? I guess so, yes. I hadn't thought of it, but it is kind of emblematic of what I'm describing. To dig in a little deeper, I suppose I was just curious reading those DODO excerpts whether there was any artistic justification for some of those prose choices. I've never read the book, so the answer may be a simple "not really", but in general I'm just as interested in exploring when genre fic succeeds in reaching some artistic merit, even if it's through an unorthodox approach, as I am in dissecting what it does wrong. Not to say that isn't anybody else's aim, I just know I can probably find a lot of reasons why any given fantasy or sci-fi novel are bad or unsuccessful, but I personally couldn't always spot the diamonds in the rough or articulate why a given passage or element of a book is successful. Edit: this is tangentially related at best but for example, The Dispossessed seems to be commonly acknowledged as literary scifi with some degree of artistic merit, and it definitely impacted me when I read it, but I couldn't break down what it did well. I'd love to see someone dig into what it accomplishes and how. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 17, 2019 04:22
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I know for a lot of my friends from high school who have since "rediscovered" reading good literature, it was a combination of teachers choosing works of literature that were often dry or a touch impenetrable to a 14-year-old (I like stuff like Moby Dick but it's hardly an easy sell for a teenager with a crappy attention span and little interest in the book to begin with) and the teaching style. At least when I was in high school there was a trend towards teaching analysis as if a book was solvable or that every single symbol warranted deep and involved deconstruction, and more painfully, that there was somehow a correct solution to deep reading of a book. It's one thing to be told you got the wrong answer for an algebraic formula, where there's an explainable reason why, it's another thing to be told, by a lit teacher that you've already kind of figured out doesn't know what they're talking about, that you have the wrong answer to a heavily subjective question.
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Mar 17, 2019 18:19
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I absolutely agree with Quantum that the big failing of traditional education about literature is that it treats the text as a puzzle box to be unlocked. Nothing is as tedious and soul-draining as looking for "symbols" in a text. I'm sort of lucky that I dodged both of those, I got to see Frankenstein and To Kill A Mockingbird murdered instead, and I had read both before they got forcibly deconstructed, so at least I had a chance to enjoy them on their own merits.
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Mar 17, 2019 18:28
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Fortunately I didn't recall hating the experience of reading TKAM, which is ironic, because in adulthood I do really dislike the book but you see, Boo Radley is the personification of the kids' fear of becoming adults and the death of their childhood, and you see she's called Scout because she's searching for her nascent femininity
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Mar 17, 2019 18:39
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A human heart posted:it does seem like anglo americans have problems with reading because they dont get told that sentences are the basic building block and that you need to look at that stuff before getting into themes and other similar things. if i was a cool smart man with a lot of time maybe i'd write a big ol effort post about how this is the root of contemporary anglo american fiction being mostly bad. I would love to read that, personally.
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Mar 18, 2019 01:23
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The_White_Crane posted:I mean, that's true, but "lots of people do it" doesn't invalidate my point that what's being called "meaning" here is nebulously defined and not congruent with the usual understanding of the word. Caveat: I am not remotely educated in any of this. That said, I think you're choosing to get unnecessarily hung up on a semantic quibble on one possible definition of "meaning". I don't disagree that there may be some validity in defining what "meaning" is in the discussion, but I disagree that what you're representing is the "usual understanding of the word." What you're construing as "meaning" reads to me more as "intention." In both of your examples, you could replace "mean" with "intend" and the statements would not only still be true, but be more exact: "he intended to catch the bus" "I didn't intend to break that vase" so those examples as a refutation of using the word "meaning" to describe what someone takes away from a piece of art feel a bit cherry-picked. I get that I'm quibbling over semantics as an argument against quibbling over semantics, but I'm not a very good debater so hopefully any of this has a point to it. I don't think there's any lost ground in the discussion for me when people say "meaning". If I found a discarded painting in a field, with no indication of who painted it or whether it was intended to be in a field, I could still find meaning in it-- it could still be meaningful and evoke a reaction, cause me to think, whatever, even though I functionally could never know and would never know the artist's intent.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:42
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Yeah seriously, keeping that in mind clarifies a lot of this discussion for me. Thirding (fourthing?) that while I imagine it can get tiring rehashing the same lit crit 101 concepts online, I'm learning a ton purely by following this thread.
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Mar 19, 2019 17:54
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Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but: my understanding of Death of the Author is specifically that by removing the Author from the interpretation of a work, it lets the reader interpret the text and find meaning in whatever subjective (and like Mel said earlier, conscious and unconscious) lenses through which they encounter the work. The whole point, as I read the essay, is that there's no prescribed method of analysis stemming from "authorial intent" or specific historical contexts that must be used when approaching a work. When it comes to these "external" contexts of historical or social conditions in which a book is written, my guess is whether or not they should be considered is entirely dependent on the importance of the reader's awareness of them upon reading the text-- if you're reading a book set in colonial South Africa and know nothing about colonial South Africa, then that will implicitly not be included in your interpretation of the text. The fact that you don't know anything about the surrounding context doesn't render your interpretation invalid, it's part of your subjective experience with the text. I think.
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Mar 19, 2019 20:46
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Yeah that's a pretty good summary Well good, I'm glad I'm not totally off base in my reading of it. I do acknowledge though, that summary doesn't really address the question of whether there's value in understanding the historical context, from a critical point of view. There are definitely books where I feel like taking the time to fill in the gaps of my own understanding of a historical setting (like before reading Heart of Darkness, for example) has probably impacted the amount I've enjoyed a book; other books I've gone in blind and still found them meaningful in some way (I can't think of a good example off the top of my head, Jane Austen maybe). That's sort of a different question than "does Death of the Author include discounting historical context" but it's one I'm interested in. Is there an inherent value, from a critical perspective, in familiarizing yourself with social or historical information from outside a text in order to "enhance" your reading of that text, either before or after the fact?
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Mar 19, 2019 21:20
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Zodiac5000 posted:This gets pretty closely at what I was trying to ask about. I naturally gravitate towards including external factors under the 'author' umbrella and was checking if that was typical or not. I'm not a huge fan of Death of the Author so I figured I probably should ask folks that are bigger proponents of it how it gets used. Thanks! I admit the first time I read Death of the Author (which was only maybe a year ago), I sort of had a kneejerk reaction against it, but on re-readings and breaking down some of the arguments Barthes makes, it's started to make more sense to me. I think what clarified it for me is that, as I read it, Barthes isn't suggesting authorial intent is totally unimportant, rather he's reacting against the primary viewpoint of most literary critics for a long time, namely that the book is the author's intent, and vice versa. The essay is saying that not only are they not the same thing, they're not even really on the same plane. Authorial intent doesn't have to be completely irrelevant, it can be another lens through which you interpret the text; the point is that subjectively, it's no more important a lens than any other that affects your experience of the text. To extrapolate that out, I understand it to mean that the primary goal of critical analysis could be many things, but it is not trying to divine the author's intent from the text, as the text is its own entity and is not synonymous with whatever the author set out to do. And that really, if you were to use authorial intent as a lens through which you view the text, you could only really do it with secondary sources that you should really treat as being just as divorced from the text itself as you would a NYT review, for example.
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Mar 19, 2019 21:29
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Of course. It's always better to be knowledgeable than to be ignorant. The idea is not that context is meaningless; it's that there are no prerequisites that you have to take before you're allowed to read a book. This is getting more into the realm of New Criticism. That makes sense, and yeah, it seemed like kind of a dumb question. I'm just so unfamiliar with critical theory that I didn't want to assume there wasn't a persuasive reason to insulate your experience of a text from those external influences. Probably would have been better to frame the question from that direction.
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Mar 19, 2019 21:31
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Setting aside the whole "angry people on the internet" aspect of that example, Death of the Author would seem to me to imply that if you were viewing the work critically, then you would absolutely not treat some random person on the internet's interpretation of it, either individual aspects or the whole, as being in any way more valid or all-encompassing as the author's interpretation of the work. People have been saying Lolita has promoted pedophilia and that its treatment of Humbert Humbert is too sympathetic and discounts it as a "real" work of literature out-of-hand. You can choose to ignore that opinion in your own interpretation of Lolita if it doesn't resonate with your experience of the book. I don't see how it would be different for a webcomic. (except I kind of do, because as much as I enjoy webcomics, the creators frequently make tone-deaf or tasteless jokes, and OotS is by no means exempt. That aside, whether or not the creator "took the criticism and improved" is irrelevant when you're approaching the work itself from a critical perspective. I think anyone is capable of having a critical, interpretive opinion of a work that is separate from their opinion of the social consciousness of the author or suitability of its humor. It's not a good argument against Death of the Author as a critical tool.)
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Mar 19, 2019 22:25
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If someone is using Death of the Author to say that nothing the author says or has written before can ever factor into someone's interpretation of a work, I think they don't understand the point of it. I think, as I understand it, the point is if those prior works or the author's stated intent resonate with your experience of the book, they can be relevant to your interpretation of it. They are neither excluded from the possible contexts, nor required contexts, for your interpretation of the work. But to get back to the original argument: the whole idea is that the author's intent doesn't matter when you're looking at the text (or work, for the sake of discussion around webcomics). The fact that the author didn't intend a joke to be transphobic doesn't mean it couldn't be legitimately interpreted as transphobic when encountered by a reader, and similarly doesn't mean it absolutely must be viewed as transphobic. If I made a racist joke when I was 12, the fact that I can recognize how tasteless it was as an adult doesn't make it any less racist to someone hearing it 18 years ago.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:49
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