Epileptic Trees/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

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* What bugs me about this is how everyone seems to brand any educated and intellectual interpretation of a text as being this ridiculous. Just because a bunch of pencilneck engineering students don't know how to apply feminist, post-colonialist, queer or Marxist literary or film theory doesn't mean that they're not valid and that the interpretations that they come up with aren't valid.

** Well, it's partly because doing that sort of thing tends to come up with results the author could did not in all probability intend.

*** Strict literary intentionalism in interpretation also means losing [[So Bad ~~Its~~ Good]], [[Alternate Character Interpretation]], and scores of other tropes or at least deeming them all illegitimate because all of them fly in the face of "authorial intent." More generally, giving the author's claimed or assumed intention special weight seems to fly in the face of how verbal, visual, and aural language work more generally. (Puns, for example, rely on the inherently multiple interpreation of words.) No matter how skilled an author is or how pure their intent, other meanings are simply a feature of the way language works and are thus legitimate so long as they follow a consistent internal logic and are based in the evidence of the book, film, song, whatever's material or "stuff."

*** Strict literary intentionalism in interpretation also means losing [[So Bad It's Good]], [[Alternate Character Interpretation]], and scores of other tropes or at least deeming them all illegitimate because all of them fly in the face of "authorial intent." More generally, giving the author's claimed or assumed intention special weight seems to fly in the face of how verbal, visual, and aural language work more generally. (Puns, for example, rely on the inherently multiple interpreation of words.) No matter how skilled an author is or how pure their intent, other meanings are simply a feature of the way language works and are thus legitimate so long as they follow a consistent internal logic and are based in the evidence of the book, film, song, whatever's material or "stuff."

**** Er, So? The Author is dead. His or her conscious intentions aren't really that important for the purposes of literary or film criticism. Although in the cases of some texts, like Kubrick films, you have to dig that far into it in order to actually FIND authorial intent.

***** Actually, like puns, [[Alternate Character Interpretation]] CAN be entirely intentional and written in by the author. Nothing in having two character interpretations negates author intent, and truly great writers can be masters at creating this ambiguity. More to YOUR point, giving special weight to authorial intent in no way flies in the face of common language on literature, even (and in some cases especially) where ambiguity exists. If authorial intent were as irrelevant as you seem to believe, there would not be whole schools of literary thought divided purely by belief in authorial intent. (For an example, do some research on Book Six of the Aenaeid and the hullabaloo that Classical scholars are in over its interpretation and how the authors intent here affects the ENTIRE reading of the WHOLE epic poem. Seriously, look it up. It's awesome.)