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There is a "literature is homework!" aspect to it, but a far larger problem is textbooks and teachers that aggressively push the One True Meaning of the work in question - often one that is exceedingly unlikely or even impossible to have been intended. This can range from "prominent use of the color blue always means that the author was suffering from depression, while red invariably signifies that the story is an allegory for anger management" through "the Mask of The Red Death is about the futility of the First World War" to "A Tale Of Two Cities is about Charles Dickens's struggle with his closeted homosexuality". All of these are things I was "taught" in school literature classes. All of them, of course, are absolutely ludicrous notions - although the last one was at least supported with some decent reasoning. This is a recipe for students to not just dislike "literature" (however you define the term), but to view the entire field of literary analysis as a pretentious circlejerk.
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Mar 17, 2019 07:27
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:Name one thing I can't blame on capitalism. Feudalism
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Mar 18, 2019 19:23
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The issue with Death of The Author comes in when a reader heavily misinterprets part of a work, and then proceeds to view the entire work (and, often, other works by the same author) by that misinterpretation. For a concrete example, I've seen some claims that the D&D webcomic The Order Of The Stick is a transphobic work, with pages of criticism trying to make this point. This revolves around two D&D jokes - the first involves an actual item in the game that changes the user's sex (taken as loot from a monster, and later used for a desperate disguise), and the second is a jab at 4E art giving reptilian characters breasts (a female lizardfolk prostitute got implants to "stay relevant"). The author was, in fact, completely bewiledered by trans people complaining about these, because it never occurred to him that the strips could even be interpreted this way. He has, as a result of this, decided that he will stay away from anything that remotely approaches the issue, on the grounds that he seems particularly blind to it and doesn't want to offend people.
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Mar 19, 2019 21:44
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killer crane posted:Yeah, ignorance of an issue leading to a faux pas isn't an excuse. The author of the lizard titty joke should spend time understanding where the interpretation came from, and what they don't see in themselves/their work, instead of trying to correct how people see their work. He didn't try to correct how people see it - he took the criticism, decided that those two jokes probably were not good, and resolved to avoid the subject in the future. My point is not "those jokes could not be taken as offensive", it is "you should not take those two jokes to declare that the entire work is ragingly transphobic. and that the author hates all trans people."
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Mar 19, 2019 22:07
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Sham bam bamina! posted:That's not Death of the Author; that's people being mad on the Internet (and forgive me if I think that this reaction looks like a straw man). I've seen similar analyses made with more traditional works and authors (Arthur Conan Doyle - for example, based on some lines in "The Adventure of The Yellow Face"), but I chose an example where the author has made very clear intent -and apologies-, and one where there is supporting evidence to support the claim that it was unintended - among other things, the rules he wrote for his forum classified transphobia as hate speech when the issue wasn't a matter of widespread public debate.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:20
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MockingQuantum posted: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. On the other hand, when the erroneous interpretation is being used to justify widespread suppression of the work in a specific context - Lolita is commonly a title where people try to remove from libraries, prohibit discussion in academic circles, and some retailers have outright refused to sell it - it becomes a major problem. Books that are open to such interpretations usually have something very valuable to say (in the case of Lolita, an obvious interpretation is how easy it is to delude yourself into thinking that a woman wants you, which is a ludicrously relevant message in 2019), and not being willing to oppose such objections is harmful to society as a whole.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:33
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:If I was to say some people take it too far, it is when Death of the Author is used as a bludgeon to ignore not only everything the author has said...but previous works as well, and even some parts of the text itself. Generally it's one of those short phases I have seen a few friends fall into when they first find out about Death of the Author, and generally grow out of. Its in the same field of when someone uses a logical fallacy and the entire rebuttal is HA LOGICAL FALLACY I WIN. This is sort of where I was trying to go in the first place. As mentioned upthread, this is exactly the context I first encountered the concept in.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:39
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pseudanonymous posted:Is that real? These are books that've been translated in 75 languages? That appears to be a Star Wars book.
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Jul 2, 2019 20:35
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