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Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.
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Re: Also here via metafandom
Date: 2010-12-02 07:17 pm (UTC)Nope. That is obviously a different discipline, using a text to understand a culture is a valid study but it's not the study of the literature.
But that doesn't mean the culture isn't relevant to studying the literature.
There is a sequence:
culture -> author -> text -> reader
It seems to me all four parts of that are important to understanding the text, and while you obviously can ignore one or more of them as far as possible if you really want to, to try to do so is to diminish your overall understanding.
Especially since the sequence actually continues:
text -> reader -> culture -> another author -> another text -> another reader -> culture -> etc.
ad infinitum.
So to give a specific example (the metaphor of architecture has limits so perhaps we could try something else) Wise Owl in the Pooh stories. Owl is a character in his own right and can be simplistically interpreted as such, so the analysis could just focus on what impressions the reader has of him and his interactions with the other characters. But an owl is also a symbol, and exactly what that symbol is has varied enormously throughout history. In the classical tradition the owl was a symbol of wisdom. In the middle ages it was a symbol of chaos and fear. But for the the modern reader an owl contains all sorts of facets related to Harry Potter, and conservation, and unfamiliarity with wild birds and lots of other things that simply didn't exist when Milne was writing. So how can it possibly be sensible to ignore the context within which the story was originally written? The modern reader's interpretation is only of interest to the modern reader, if you are to say anything else surely you have to try to understand the cultural context and hence the viewpoint from which Milne was writing?
Sorry to bother you with this pestering. It's just I've often seen people on DW or LJ say that authorial intent is irrelevant and I've never understood why.