Question about how we look at text

[sartorias]

I’m beginning with the assumption that before print, when few in Western Europe were literate, and most texts copied laboriously, there was a sense that texts were authoritative, or truth

Comments

[cliosfolly]

Palimpsests and archives have been suggested as terms that might be useful for framing discussions of fanfiction (and I think there's also a third concept, if not more, but the details are currently slipping my mind).

The notion of an archive might be useful here, too: the authorial text(s) plus whatever other authorial writings/media exist plus fan media and fan conversations, all engaging with and influencing each other, and all available to be read/viewed, or not, according to readers' interests.

[sartorias]

Oh, that resonates with me; archival mindset is something that I incline toward. Thank you.

[cliosfolly]

It's really useful for thinking of medieval texts, too--Arthurian lit operated very much in the form of an archive, as did Biblical literature, stories about Troy, and the Canterbury Tales. A story might refer to specific texts, or to the extraliterary tradition of the character, like visual media, and so forth.

[sartorias]

Yes, yes! I got that sense of Arthurian operating within an archive when I was struggling with Wolfram way back in grad school, and then with Chretien et al. Loved it--that sense added greatly to my enjoyment, in fact.

[scribblerworks]

I don't think it's an either/or situation. I think it is much more both this and that case.

I do think that a work should be able to stand on its own feet, and not have to lean on anything the author has said extra-textual to it. If it cannot endure on its own, I wouldn't call it a "fully formed" work. And I think there is a level of scholarship that aught to be able to work on material that way - that can find truth in the work that is not reliant upon data outside the work.

But there is no denying that the internet has made it possible to easily make public authorial discussion of material and meaning, in ways that had never been possible outside of personal correspondence or small sharing groups. And it would be foolish to say that we should never look at such things in considering the works of writers. I'm thinking here of Diana Glyer's The Company They Keep, which highlights the value of considering the possibilities of the extra-textual matters

[sartorias]

I think you are right about adaptation.

[lady_ganesh]

That's more or less my thought as well.

[sizztheseed]

I was discussing something that on first blush would seem completely off-topic, but bear with me. We were discussing the period between Edmund Spencer and Francis Bacon, and the introduction of scientific allegories to period poetry, all in the context of our niece's homework. In particular, Ben Jonson's The Hourglass and Spencer's Fire and Ice. The allegories themselves, by being so dated, show a glimpse into the alchemical view on the nature of matter. The idea of atoms moving the flow of sand, or the idea of water hardening in cold miss the key concepts of gravity and latent heat, for example. They're not wrong, just missing information

[sartorias]

Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. Avoid work some more.

I have to read this again, because my brain she is rattling around inside my skull like electrified peas after reading this comment.

[scribblerworks]

There are some good thoughts here, but... heh, you totally distracted me with "bowels of our mind"! Ummm.... is that where I want to go, metaphorically, for really good, deep thoughts?

:D

[sartorias]

Mentally I translated that to tectonics!

[avengangle]

I have a hard time reading the books of authors with whom I have major disagreements, and it tends to make me dislike their books more. (Although in some cases, there's agreement that the author has had a general decline.) But then again, I'm still able to retain my critical faculties when an author whom I like personally publishes a book, so that's sort of strange.

I'm still in the middle of one of the works in question, though, so I'll critique it in another 218 pages.

[ursule]

Once upon a time, the idea that the text should stand alone was shocking and radical. The "New Critics" (starting with Ezra Pound & T.S. Eliot and so forth) put forward the idea that the study of English literature should involve focusing on the formal properties of the text to combat what they saw as the fusty study of English literature as it then existed (focusing on biographical & philological questions, like who might have been the model for Shakespeare's Dark Lady, or how his vocabulary related to Chaucer's).

And then their movement won-- and in the process of entrenching itself in universities, became fusty and dusty itself.

[sartorias]

Yep, I had a sense of that . . . and wasn't there at least one sling aimed at the French Academie, as well, in that? Or maybe I'm conflating two schools of criticism.

[egretplume]

This is a great comment. Thank you.