My fault, Jeff, I was using "pretend" in its obsolete form - to profess,
allege, or claim. My English use has been infected by Italian. Now it only
means to feign, or to allege falsely. Shame, but still. So remove the word,
and I think we still have the same disagreement. Or else we agree on "the
problematical nature of poetic language when it meets individual readers",
but we respond to this in very different ways.
However, I should add that my "approval" or not has not really been part of
my argument, but only something you've inferred. "Value judgments and
ideology" obviously enter into criticism, but they're not what I'm talking
about here. Unless you mean my point that some arguments about literature
are more persuasive than others, which of course implies a value judgment. I
take them (value judgments) to be universal - in the weak sense that we
can't help making them. So perhaps I was right to use the word "pretend"...?
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.
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