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

[vega_ofthe_lyre]

In specific reference to racefail and related dramas--Anne Rice's online buffoonery comes to mind--well, in an ideal world, I would be able to perfectly separate a text from its author. As is... I can't, and I don't think it is necessarily always a bad thing? I've had a lot of my views of authors irrevocably tainted over the past few months, or even the past few years, but I feel like that's fair. No one's perfect, but no one exists in a bubble, either, and everyone's held accountable for, and judged on, their actions in different spheres of their lives. I don't think authors should be exempt from that. Our world's too small now. And I don't like reading texts anymore without some idea of context, which perhaps is coming from someone growing up in this narrowing, Wiki'd up world--I can read volumes of material and not feel any connection to it, just like I'm staring at a brick wall, until I have some biographical reference to have my ah-ha, that's what they're trying to say, that's where that view is coming from moment. Dangerous at

[sartorias]

Yes. I remember rereading Baroness Orcszy (sp?) in college, after having galloped through Pimpernel as a 12 year old, and wondering who rewrote it with all the nasty stuff in it?

I think I find it easier to place these stereotypes, and the attitudes that can employ them in fiction, in the context of the time. (I really love context, too.) When I see similar things in work published now, I can be far more disturbed, though I struggle with the "It's just a story!" exclamation.

[vega_ofthe_lyre]

I knew of the Scarlet Pimpernel as a teenager and had probably seen a film adaption at some point, but I didn't read the actual novel until I was an adult and was actively put off by the blatant anti-French attitude (I'm part French and therefore very sensitive to that), the casual sexism and the way Sir Percy treats his wife. The Anti-Semitism in the final chapters was what pushed that novel completely over the edge for me. I just cannot like it, which is doubly disappointing, because it was something I expected to enjoy.

Cora

[sartorias]

Yes, yes, and yes. Even the writing is bad!

I watch the Anthony Andrews movie, and pretend the book isn't there.

[marydell]

I think that ways of reading are as much part of different literary movements as ways of writing. (I wrote a big long thing about this back in January, in case you care to read it). In a nutshell, new criticism and some other approaches to reading say that the text should stand alone; postmodernism says that it should not (There are other literary movements, of course; I just wrote about those two because they're what I studied).

Postmodernism is, to my mind, more inclusive, but it can be hard to engage with, if you come from a school of thought that privileges text over context.

Anyway I think we run into trouble when we start talking about books without knowing what school of readership other people in the discussion hail from. The internet definitely brings people of different ages & scholarly traditions together without necessarily making that clear, so the "you're reading it wrong" thing comes up more than it might in more homogeneous environments, where everyone in the conversation was taught the same approach to text.

[sartorias]

Oh, that is such a good post--thank you for the link. Yes, such very good food for thought.

[marydell]

Thanks!

[joycemocha]

Thank you for writing this. I think you raise an excellent point about clarifying what scholarly traditions we come from when we get into these discussions.

[safewrite]

Good discussion. Thanks for sharing.

[malkingrey]

This is one of the big reasons why, as a scholar, I liked being a medievalist. All of our authors were safely dead, and most of the earlier ones were anonymous as well.

(Not that that stopped critics from maintaining, for a decade or so, that just about everybody who ever wrote anything during the western European middle ages was absolutely orthodox; nor, a couple of decades later, from maintaining that just about everybody who ever wrote anything during the western European middle ages was secretly writing subversive critiques of the dominant paradigm. But it was a lot harder to do it with a straight face.)

[sartorias]

Heh!

[klrichardsson]

And this is why I'm getting my PhD in medieval lit as well.

I thought I was the only one. ;)

[malkingrey]

Nope, not even. The sf/fantasy field is absolutely lousy with renegade medievalists.

[barbarienne]

This starts to become the inverse of the "readers' 50%" principle. The writer can write something, and it will never be read by the reader just for the words it is. The reader, even knowing zero about the writer, will still read the book through a veil of the reader's own experience

[marycatelli]

One she didn't touch on for 4. is that the reader may learn that someone can disagree with him without being a benighted fool. Alas, that usually falls under 2.

[sartorias]

I guess that too is part of the reader's 50%. I remember reading a lot of letters and essays about Ezra Pound, and how people shouldn't read his poetry because he was so horrible in person . . . not that you could see it in the poems that made their way to print.

Then, during my own lifetime, I recall some roaring and stomping about the "irresponsibility" in publishing Hunter S. Thompson because of the lifestyle he led; he was no real journalist, yadda yadda.