JMC wrote:
> To some degree, the intentionalist
> fallacy is inescapable if we're going to
> think historically.
-- It seems to me that we might take interpretation to depend on the
intentions of the author in varying degrees. At one extreme, we might
suppose that interpretation should be "based" solely on the "foundation" of
the author's intentions. That's surely a mistake in reasoning -- in other
words, a fallacy. I'm happy to call it the "intentional fallacy". At the
other extreme, we can deny that interpretation should ever have anything at
all to do with the author's intentions. I think that's a mistake too --
another fallacy (for which I know of no agreed name).
Somewhere in the middle, we might suppose that interpretation should usually
be loosely guided by the author's intentions, as well as by many other
things, some of which are more important than the author's intentions, and
which can override them. In my view, this middle way is not a mistake in
reasoning at all, and so doesn't deserve to be called a "fallacy". Thinking
historically involves that sort of thing. So I think I agree with you, JMC,
except I don't want to concede that we're committing a fallacy when we think
historically.
JMC again:
> I think all Jeremy needs to do to show
> the relevance of his argument is to link
> the film directly to the 50s.
-- I don't have any grand theory of the film _Shane_ -- I just want to
caution against reading too much into it, or reading the wrong things into
it. I believe that Stevens' personal experience of the failure of his own
marriage is important, as is his personal experience of filming Belsen
following its liberation. Perhaps the growing ambivalence of the time about
the Korean War is important too, but I'm not sure. All of these factors are
relevant to the interpretation of _Shane_, and all belong to its age.
I feel fairly sure that it is a mistake to interpret _Shane_ in terms of a
"homophilic" attachment between the boy and Shane. From our perspective, the
boy (or Shane) may look androgynous, and he doesn't shy away from personal
contact (Shane runs his fingers through the boy's hair more than once), and
so on, but I think we should resist the temptation of supposing that these
things have "homophilic" significance. I think they amount to extraneous
noise that is best ignored.
Similarly, Shakespeare uses the word 'pot' sometimes, but if we take him to
refer to the smoking of cannabis, we are mistaken. Shakespeare doesn't even
refer to the smoking of tobacco (I read somewhere recently). The suggestion
(to our 20th century ears) that he refers to smoking cannabis when he uses
the word 'pot' is best ignored.
Jeremy
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