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> If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's t
by mhurron 10y ago
> If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better?
If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. If they can not, well maybe the authors intent wasn't what the questions are asking.
Of course this is a fundamental problem in the way we teach and test literature. No piece of work has a single meaning because meaning is found in the merging of the work and the viewers background. What we teach is that works have one correct interpretation and if you do not read it that way, you are wrong.
- steveklabnik 10y agoRelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
- Retric 10y agoWhich fails as it assumes text must have inherent meaning. But, it lets people avoid criticism making it a popular standpoint.
- jasode 10y ago>Which fails as it assumes text must have inherent meaning. It doesn't assume that. It doesn't matter whether the text does or does not have inherent meaning. The essay's point is that the reader's judgement is just as valid as the writer's. As an extreme example, the phrase "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"[1] can be interpreted by the reader as having meaning even though Noam Chomsky says it's a meaningless sentence. The author is not the final and not the only interpretation that's valid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fu...
- Y201K 10y agoThat's not really the reason that phrase was thought up tho..
- Retric 10y agoWith zero context your comment is without meaning. The only thing that separates it from a randomly generated markov chain is context. Now, that does not mean the Author is infallible. But, discounting the authors intend is like ignoring a books sequels or even the second half of the text. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCeFbK-WEVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCeFbK-WEVE In the end by discounting the author you are left with the lowest form of criticism, how did that make me feel. Which is not actually about the text, just the person writing. Getting back to your phrase. Someone can assume line noise has meaning, but they are simply mistaken.
- bryanrasmussen 10y agoprobably the ability of people to supply a meaning and agree on that meaning amongst themselves with relative ease might differentiate that comment from a randomly generated markov chain.
- Retric 10y agoThat ability is based on context. Ignoring the author's culture includes their language. Consider handing just that text to an alien along side a few thousand similar, but randomly generated texts.
- bryanrasmussen 10y agowhoa wait, how did we get from ignoring the author's intent was ignoring all context to that means you are also ignoring the author's culture and ignoring the author's culture means ignoring their language to so the only way you can analyze a text without taking an author's intent into it is by handing it off to an alien with text mining tech? I'm just saying the main context I'm seeing here is goalpost moving.
- Retric 10y agoI have been consistent in my line of argument. The written word is a medium of exchange not an independent artifact. If you read a recipe with "Add 3 cups of water." the author's intent is to tell you how to make something edible. So, it means poor 3 cups of water not take three 1 cup containers with water and add the containers and water to the mixture. You can find examples like this in any lengthy text. But, death of the author is not about exploring that kind of grammatical wordplay it's about shielding the critic from reality. Thus, intent is both considered and ignored when it helps them.
- EdHominem 10y ago> The essay's point is that the reader's judgement is just as valid as But it's not. The question isn't "what does this mean to YOU", but "what did this mean to the author". If I pick words randomly I can say with authority that there is no meaning in the words, and for all your understandings you can't change that the words were picked blindly, and thus without meaning. > The author is not the final and not the only interpretation that's valid. As to the author's intent, yes it is. Whatever intent there was is set down with the ink on paper. You come later, as a reader, so your interpretation is at most an addendum and not part of the original. > [...] can be interpreted by the reader as having meaning even though Noam Chomsky says it's a meaningless sentence. Sure. But an interpretation isn't a change in the nature of the actual thing. Even if I interpret an elephant as a butterfly it won't fly away. This entire literary "discipline" (cough) is based on refusing to use an accurate description of the practice. Everyone agrees that a text can invoke various things - even unintended things - in various readers. That doesn't mean you're finding something inherent in the text but in the reader.
- ktRolster 10y agoExistential comics vaguely addresses the point: http://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Roland_Barthes http://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Roland_Barthes
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jasode 10y ago>If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. To echo the other comments questioning that premise, there's also the famous Isaac Asimov anecdote: Isaac Asimov often repeated an anecdote based on this: He once sat in on a class where the topic of discussion was one of his own works. (He did this in the back of a large lecture hall so he could remain semi-anonymous). After the class ended, he went up and introduced himself to the teacher, saying that he had found the teacher's interpretation of the story interesting, though it really wasn't what he had meant at all. The teacher's response: "Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you have the slightest idea what it's about?"
- Pitarou 10y agoAsimov being Asimov, he then went on to write a story about Shakespeare being summoned from the past to take a college course on his plays. He failed, of course.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoWhich story was that? edit: Someone else linked to it in the comments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Bard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Bard
- notahacker 10y agoAccording to popular legend John Lennon had a slightly different reaction to learning that his lyrics were being crudely analysed by high school teachers. He wrote "I am the Walrus".
- justifier 10y agoprofessors teach to their opinion i took a shakespeare course at university where we were asked to read troilus and cressida and compare it to its source troilus and criseyde by chaucer i wrote that i disliked the piece because it just read like someone who recently got burned in love venting irrationally, noting that i liked shakespeare's version more because he gives the last word to pandarus(o) who uses it to comically complain about his health and i felt this beautifully subverted the assumed tragedy the characters felt subject to in their stories.. woe is me! i failed the exam frustrated i went looking for evidence to defend my claim(i).. though contrary to the linked comic i did find some interesting notes first off chaucer was a source for shakespeare, but hardly the source of the work chaucer's main source was boccaccio's il filastrato.. which was based off an earlier version known as le roman de troie by benoît de sainte-maure but the interesting bit comes from boccaccio's version(ii) because the story itself is only 8 cantos long, even the wikipedia page says the work itself is only 8 cantos long!(iii), but there is an additional canto, a ninth canto, wherein the author, boccaccio, addresses the reader and apologises for writing the poem and states he's unsure where it came from but asserts that he was recently dumped (o) http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html (i) https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/06 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/06 (i/2) https://store.penny-arcade.com/products/agree-with-me-tee https://store.penny-arcade.com/products/agree-with-me-tee (ii) http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/filostrato_griffin.pdf http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/filostrato_griffin.pdf (iii) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Filostrato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Filostrato front page of reddit right now.. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_in_school/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_i... ;P
- SamBam 10y ago> If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. Well, that's very much up for debate. The Intentional Fallacy claims that authorial intent is not a valid part of artistic criticism or interpretation. That all you can judge a work on is the internal text and surrounding body of context, not notions of what was going on in the artist's head. The idea is debated, to be sure.
- oddlyaromatic 10y agoIf the question, and the purpose of the exam, is framed as "why did the author do this or that?", then sure authorial intent has meaning to the question. And I certainly think what the author intended to mean can be culturally interesting. But for the individual experience of the work, intent beyond that included in the work itself doesn't have much bearing. So, to me, this post has a lot to do with the wrong kind of questions being asked of students. Poetry is not all about discovering what an author hoped you might feel and being "right". It's about your own experience of the words and ideas in the poem- or movie or whatever. I guess what I'm saying is poetry runs on the client?
- nradov 10y agoThe ironic thing there is that the entire field of artistic criticism and interpretation is invalid (or at least not provably valid) and thus practitioners have no legitimate basis for claiming that particular techniques are more or less valid than others. The whole thing is built on a foundation of sand, and largely operates as a make-work jobs program for academics who would be otherwise unemployable.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10y agoI wouldn't call it "invalid", but rather say that we should not be judging the success of our children on such a subjective item. There is value in such subjectivity, and it's a cultural exercise in which we can discover more about ourselves and others, but it has no place in an objective location like a standardized test.
- gumby 10y ago> If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. If they can not, well maybe the authors intent wasn't what the questions are asking. This is the crux of the matter. James Joyce (just to pick someone whose work is heavily discussed) may have made a reference to a common Catholic belief and not realized it because he was embedded in Irish Catholicism. It could have made some metaphor stronger or weaker. When you discuss the metaphor you may be discussing the author's unwitting intent. Thus the author themselves might not be the proper authority (except for their own overt motivations). Literature isn't special in this regard -- after all we go to psychiatrists & therapists to help us learn about our own actions that we don't understand.
- notahacker 10y agoThe original author's "I just pause there" answer for the stanza division sounds like a classic example of the author subconsciously building in structural features, or just forgetting why she structured it that way in the first place because she associates it with performances rather than a process of writing now. (It's not as if programmers necessarily remember why every little structural feature of programs they wrote some time ago are still there, after all) Having Googled the original poem, there's really only one place you could split it into two stanzas, which coincides with repetition of phrases from the first stanza - the only repetition in the poem - and which is where the poem switches from thinking about Monday to it being Sunday at midnight. I don't think the author put the pause there purely to save her breath... (you can read the original poem - typeset without the stanzas - and the original questionable high school questions here http://www.jiskha.com/display.cgi?id=1394137792 http://www.jiskha.com/display.cgi?id=1394137792) It's also worth noting that even if the assumed authorial intent is completely wrong (like many other theories of authorial intent attributed to authors who usually aren't around to question it), it's a far more reasonable interpretation than the other multiple choice answers. Though this doesn't really apply to some of the other examples
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thirdsun 10y agoYou're correct in saying that any interpretation but the one of the author is speculation and therefor shouldn't be regarded as absolute. > What we teach is that works have one correct interpretation and if you do not read it that way, you are wrong. That's not my experience. At least in my school days, in Germany, it wasn't common to only accept one interpretation as correct. As long as we could reasonably justify and explain our interpretations we were fine.
- imagist 10y ago> If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. Why is that? There are a myriad of ways to analyze a piece, and many focus on reader response rather than authorial intent. You can dismiss reader response as merely incorrect initially, but this becomes complicated when you try to analyze works written by reader response critics. Indeed some authors like Burroughs take this to the extreme, introducing randomness (via cut-up technique) to their writing in an attempt to eschew even the possibility of authorial intent. Burroughs was somewhat limited in his approach by the technology of his day, but it's not hard to imagine approaches using modern technology which remove an author from the system completely. I am not saying I agree that reader response criticism entirely: just because authorial intent isn't special doesn't mean that reader response is the answer. Frequently reader response is used as a way for critics to use a piece of literature as a soapbox for their own ideologies, and I find that distasteful. But I do think that there's some validity to the idea that authors don't have any special authority to interpret their own work. For example, look at the song "I'll be watching you". Sting had said that he intended this song to be about government surveillance. But almost universally this song has been (mis?)interpreted as being about a stalker. Any analysis of the song which focused solely on Sting's intent would be incomplete, because the interpretation of the consumers of the song is far more related to its cultural relevance.
- matthewowen 10y agoNot sure what you mean here, but my experience of studying literature at university was not at all that there is "one correct interpretation". There are a bunch of different critical lenses you can coherently read texts through.