dagblog - Comments for "J. K. Rowling Is Wrong About Her Own Books"

Interesting disagreement. I

Donal — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 17:56:49 +0000

Interesting disagreement. I have certainly been exposed to a lot of people that do far more than just read their favorite stories. I've dressed as minor characters from several animes so I could share my daughter's cosplay experience. Darkon shows a lot of people that take role-playing a lot farther. Fan-fic stories evolve with constant review and commentary from readers.

Had JK Rowling written HP on fan-fiction.com, there would have been some commenters telling her to get Harry and Hermione together, and others accusing her of putting in Hermione as a Mary Sue. And others would have demanded that Snape get some romantic scenes ASAP. Rowling for her part, could have teased the readers with a stream of misleading author's notes.

I find myself wondering if storytellers, both those that traveled and those that stayed put, considered printed books - which could not be modified or embellished to suit the circumstances of their audience - to be bullshit?

Apparently, I can't bring

Doctor Cleveland — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 13:58:35 +0000

In reply to Sorry, I didn't meant to piss

Apparently, I can't bring this discussion to a conclusion. I tried emphasizing how much we agreed, and you kept pushing. I tried showing you that I was getting upset, and you kept pushing.

The practices you accuse me of belittling, the practices I called bullshit, are specific practices and I gave specific examples. Are you saying that trying to understand Emily Dickinson's poetry by visiting her grave is not bullshit? Because that's a piece of rock, actually.

I've given you a long series of specific, concrete examples, in the original post and in this thread, of instances where either 1) reader's investment in the author led to an odd or silly result or 2) the author him or herself offered interpretations that are pretty shaky.

Why don't you come up with some specific, concrete examples of the author saving the day and setting people right by offering his or her own interpretation?

I'll be offline until Saturday, because I've been invited somewhere to give some talks.

Sorry, I didn't meant to piss

Michael Wolraich — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 13:22:00 +0000

In reply to Okay, clearly this got to

Sorry, I didn't meant to piss you off. I certainly never accused you of belittling your students. But you are most definitely belittling one way that people engage with art. Illogical, incoherent, fun, goofing, not meaningful, bullshit--these are your words. I'm all for teaching students additional ways to read, but the belittling does not add a new way. It subtracts an old way, closing it off as an accepted method of study.

This is the part that reminds me of the logical positivists. They were trying to confront what they saw as the scourge of Hegelianism and the pop-philosophy of the masses. They found those ideas to be illogical, incoherent, not meaningful, bullshit. So they just ruled them out by defining meaning in such a way as preclude language that was not reducible to experience. They recognized that ordinary people used "natural language" to communicate but dismissed it as inappropriate for serious philosophy. What they ended up with was a stilted logical syntax that was interesting and important but had little to do with what language is.

The postmodernists, who ironically came out of the Hegelian tradition, were not so different. They also wanted to change language to preclude the practices of their predecessors and the masses. They did it by inventing new words (différance) and re-purposing old ones (hermeneutics). And I believe that their project has been just as artificial. To be specific, I don't agree with you that visiting Emily Dickenson's grave or Shakespeare's parents' house is bullshit. I don't agree that making up Sherlock Holmes plot points or debating Rowling's comments on Dumbledore is bullshit. These are natural and indeed meaningful ways of engaging with art. Redefining the practice of interpretation to exclude these and other efforts to communicate with the author does not produce better interpretations, it produces a certain kind of interpretation that offers some insights into the text at the expense of others. Trying to convince the rest of the world that this is what interpretation ought to be is a losing game because the other parts that you dismiss are also part of what interpretation is.

PS To clarify, I'm not suggesting that holding a seance at Dickenson's grave is an effective way to understand her intentions just that the pursuit of an author's intentions is a meaningful way to understand the text.

I hope you're storing them in

Verified Atheist — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 12:56:13 +0000

In reply to I don't know what mine are

I hope you're storing them in an argon-based atmosphere.

Everybody knows how to read

Verified Atheist — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 12:55:45 +0000

In reply to Okay, clearly this got to

Everybody knows how to read for pleasure: how to enter the imaginary world of the story, how to identify with the characters, how to grasp any morals on offer. I do that too, when I read for pleasure. My students don't need to be taught to do that. But they DO need to be taught ADDITIONAL ways to read.

I'm with you, and I felt the exact same way when TA'ing computer science class. Everybody knows how to code for pleasure: how to create a program to print "Hello World", how to generate a fractal, how to calculate the Fibonacci sequence. I do that too, when I code for pleasure. My students don't need to be taught to do that. But they DO need to be taught ADDITIONAL ways to code.

Don't take my humor too seriously, as I realize I'm comparing apples to oranges, but I stand by my point that I think you might be assuming too much about your students. That said, it sure would be nice if everybody knew how to read for pleasure.

Edit to add: this does not subtract from your larger point, however.

Okay, clearly this got to

Doctor Cleveland — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 01:21:00 +0000

In reply to The thing is, outside of

Okay, clearly this got to me:

Postmodernism belittles and dismisses this way of engaging with art. Lit professors try to teach unenlightened undergraduates to suppress the instinct to scrutinize the author's intentions. But in doing so, I think they miss something important about how people actually understand and appreciate art. To reiterate my original comment, I believe that a literary theory should strive to explain how we read, not tell us how we ought to read.

I don't agree that I should "strive to explain how we read."

I certainly don't agree that I am belittling my students.

Everybody knows how to read for pleasure: how to enter the imaginary world of the story, how to identify with the characters, how to grasp any morals on offer. I do that too, when I read for pleasure. My students don't need to be taught to do that. But they DO need to be taught ADDITIONAL ways to read.

I would never say that reading for pleasure is wrong, and I don't tell my students that. But I do tell them that they need to have other ways to read as well.

When I'm teaching film, for example, I expect my students to think and write about the FILM ITSELF, not the story in the film. Cuts and editing matter. Camera angles matter. And, bear with me now, those things are REAL in a way that the story the film tells is not. There is no James Bond. There *are* three films called Casino Royale (two straight, one a parody), each composed of a particular sequence of images to create a certain effect. The series of pictures is an actual thing we can talk about.

When I teach literature, the actual words on the page are something we can talk about productively. And I focus my students on talking about it.

I gotta read that book one of

wabby — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:57:10 +0000

In reply to Fifty Shades of J

I gotta read that book one of these days.

And mebbe a few others.

Deep sigh. Deep breath. Let's

Doctor Cleveland — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:55:00 +0000

In reply to The thing is, outside of

Deep sigh. Deep breath.

Let's start with "outside of academia" ... I take it that your position is that folks inside academia are being unrealistic and denying the way people in the "real world" read things. Great. Let me suggest that the question isn't whether people inside or outside college walls do a thing. What matters is whether the thing they do is actually logical or coherent. (If we're going to play the "outside of academia" game, there are lots of odd beliefs that flourish outside classrooms.)

I get that people are interested in reading things in a certain way, and that they enjoy reading things in a certain way, and that they attach meaning to reading in that way. I am not denying that people believe this way of reading is meaningful.

What I'm saying is, if you put almost any weight on those ways of reading they collapse pretty fast. Academics avoid that way of reading because we have seen how fast it falls apart.

What looks to many outsiders like a group of arbitrary and bullshitty academic rules are, in fact, attempts to reduce the amount of bullshit.

People "outside academia" go to Emily Dickinson's grave to feel closer to her poetry. That is a nice thing to do. But it is mostly bullshit.

People "outside academia" travel thousands of miles to look at period furniture in Shakespeare's parents' house (because his own house was torn down centuries ago). That is enormously touching, and a testimony to how much they love his work. But face it: it's bullshit.

People "outside academia" spend time they could spend on other things going through all the Sherlock Holmes stories making up elaborate extra plot points to explain away little inconsistencies. They clearly have fun. But it's bullshit.

People "outside academia" try to figure out what this or that singer meant by a lyric, and that's fun. But it's bullshit. You will never work it out, because really, you can't. It's just goofing. A pastime.

And J. K. Rowling giving little interviews telling her fans this or that to stir them up is kind of bullshit, too. It's not a heinous crime. It's mostly mischief. But her telling you to read Dumbledore as gay is really just bullshit. The character is not gay in the book, he's got no life outside the book. Saying he's gay is just rereading the book for people. (Did she imagine him as gay? Maybe. Who cares? On the page or it didn't happen.)

Academics who work on literature have a set of rules for arguing about what happens in a piece of writing, and what counts as evidence, and how much that evidence counts. If those rules sound like bullshit to you, they're actually designed to screen bullshit out.

Fifty Shades of J

Donal — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:50:06 +0000

In reply to I'm so glad all you all's are

Fifty Shades of J

The thing is, outside of

Michael Wolraich — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:09:00 +0000

In reply to What the author intended by

The thing is, outside of academia, authors' notes, interviews, even clothes and houses really do matter to people, and they actually do change the way we think about the art. You see this effect very dramatically in pop music. Fans are often dying to know what a favorite songwriter meant by some cryptic lyric. They want to know who broke the singer's heart, where he grew up, and why his songs are so sad. Our fascination with Shakespeare is not so different. Was he gay? If the text stands on its own, it shouldn't matter. But I guarantee you that if we somehow found out, it would change the way most people think about his plays, not to mention Sonnet 20.

Postmodernism belittles and dismisses this way of engaging with art. Lit professors try to teach unenlightened undergraduates to suppress the instinct to scrutinize the author's intentions. But in doing so, I think they miss something important about how people actually understand and appreciate art. To reiterate my original comment, I believe that a literary theory should strive to explain how we read, not tell us how we ought to read.