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The argument that convinced me that as a policy, Wikipedia gets it right, was someone using George Lucas and the "Han Solo shot first" incident as an example. J
by garbagecoll 14y ago
The argument that convinced me that as a policy, Wikipedia gets it right, was someone using George Lucas and the "Han Solo shot first" incident as an example. Just because someone is the author doesn't necessarily mean everybody should automatically take his word as canon... Now, if he managed to get The New Yorker to publish such thing as truth...
Not saying it's the same case here, of course, just an example.
- justin66 14y agoSpeaking more generally, there's a case to be made that the author's intent of what a work "really means" is not necessarily any more sound than that of any other reader. What the author was thinking when he wrote it is not the point, the meaning of the thing itself is. I tend to agree. On the other hand, the bit that Philip Roth was upset about was not really about the meaning of the text. It was about someone's opinion of what he was thinking when he wrote the text. I can understand why he feels that he knows more about what he was thinking when he wrote the text than anyone else does. I haven't seen anything that would indicate that he fails to recognize that everyone is entitled to their own interpretation of the meaning of the text.