Jeff, another angle of approach, if you can bear with me. Have you never had
your personal response to a poem (or novel or film etc.) changed by contact
with another person's opinion or argument? For the present discussion, let's
say by a critical essay.
If so, what has happened to this "problematical" meeting of text and reader?
It's been interfered with.
Your original conception has been modified by an opinion you've had to
concede was more persuasive or even more objectively true than your own - is
how I would put it. So our responses are not static and immutable. However
reluctantly, we can be persuaded...
Maybe you'd have a different way of describing this process?
Jamie
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey Side
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 5:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "Multiple Registers, Intertextuality and Boundaries of
Interpretation in Veronica Forrest-Thompson"
Tim, I agree with your:
“To then say that such a text is a 'reduced text' is to automatically
prioritize the author's (or what someone in agreement with the author)
writing over the reader's reading, when, in actual fact, they are identical
texts. It is not a matter of 'pretending the allusions etc are unimportant'
any more than pretending that they are important, it is a matter of what
actually happens when the human reader encounters the inhuman text.”
Jamie, when you say:
“It’s arguable that pretending every interpretation is equally valid is not
just a dumbing-down of the art but also patronizing to those people whom the
person who cries ‘elitist’ is meant to be defending.”
It’s not really a question of “pretending”; there is no pretence in
operation. It is merley the consequence of the problematical nature of
poetic language when it meets individual readers. Whether you “approve” of
this or not, is beside the point. Value judgments and ideology shouldn’t
really come into this.
|