These seem like false alternatives to me. One can do both, or
something in between.
Hal, who hasn't read the whole interview of course
Halvard Johnson
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On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Jeffrey Side <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Bruce Andrews interview at The Argotist Online:
>
> http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Andrews%20interview.htm
>
>
> Excerpt:
>
> "Since I’m interested in the experience of the reader, I haven’t been
> interested in chance. Chance might seem to open the possibilities for the
> reader to the widest level, but often it doesn’t get the reader anywhere,
> it’s so open that nothing counts, nothing has any significance, none of the
> connections are designed to have any effect on the reader, and therefore it
> often seems like it ignores the reader, just as much as any type of closed
> textual work. So in a weird way chance and the old notion of intentionality
> end up having the same relationship to the reader, in both cases the reader
> is ignored. Either you don’t care what the reader makes of something because
> there’s not much to make of it, or you ignore the reader because you’ve
> already figured out what everything means, maybe they’ll get it maybe they
> won’t, but you don’t care either way because your job is to create this
> edifice, this autotelic text, as if it means by itself and doesn’t require
> the reader to get on board, and if the reader does have some interest in
> getting on board then they have to pay tuition to take the class to be told
> what things actually meant as if the lecturer is ventriloquizing the author.
> You know, if you read old lit crit, it’s often outrageous, the
> presumptiveness of it. I mean, “this means this, and I know because this is
> what the author meant.” I mean, who the fuck knows what the author meant?
> That’s always irritating to me, because it closes things down. But in a
> weird way, totally randomizing product does too."
>
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