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authorial intent
It just occurred to me that it would be really easy in this day and age to put together a portfolio of online and offline writings by creators to show students how impossible it is to get at authorial intent as any meaningful way of interpreting the text. (I don't deny the you can get it authorial intent as a meaningful way of interpreting the authors, nor do I deny that some might find it fruitful to analyze the disjunction between stated authorial intent and the text as it stands. I just find neither of these interesting from a literary criticism point of view.)
But these days, creators of texts are so willing to talk about their intentions that would be really easy to let students analyze a series of texts, make their own judgments, and then read stated authorial intent. Example: give them a series of texts whose creators have claimed to have major feminist intent but where the text itself is a mixed bag, such as Buffy, or (far worse) Veronica Mars. Or how about His Dark Materials, together with an essay by Pullman in which he explains how the trilogy brought down the kingdom of god? (/me pets poor Pullman on the head) Or a book by one of the many authors who has shown his or her ass on the Internet over the last few years -- because some of them have written quite thoughtful, kyriarchy-challenging books? Or the Twilight series, along with Stephenie Meyer explaining how feminist her books are, how much they celebrate her female characters' freedom of choice?
I feel like this could potentially be really fruitful, in helping students to understand that while what authors say might be interesting, it's not a useful way of analyzing the text in hand.
But these days, creators of texts are so willing to talk about their intentions that would be really easy to let students analyze a series of texts, make their own judgments, and then read stated authorial intent. Example: give them a series of texts whose creators have claimed to have major feminist intent but where the text itself is a mixed bag, such as Buffy, or (far worse) Veronica Mars. Or how about His Dark Materials, together with an essay by Pullman in which he explains how the trilogy brought down the kingdom of god? (/me pets poor Pullman on the head) Or a book by one of the many authors who has shown his or her ass on the Internet over the last few years -- because some of them have written quite thoughtful, kyriarchy-challenging books? Or the Twilight series, along with Stephenie Meyer explaining how feminist her books are, how much they celebrate her female characters' freedom of choice?
I feel like this could potentially be really fruitful, in helping students to understand that while what authors say might be interesting, it's not a useful way of analyzing the text in hand.
Re: Also here via metafandom
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.