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Why couldn't 19 year old Nas reference the Talmud? The goal of any critical reading isn't necessarily to reverse engineer the author's intended meaning, it's t

Why couldn't 19 year old Nas reference the Talmud? The goal of any critical reading isn't necessarily to reverse engineer the author's intended meaning, it's to examine the work in context: ------------------ http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-stars-spoilers/ http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-s... Q. Isn’t authorial intent important in terms of communication between reader and writer? A. But it ISN’T a conversation between you and me if all you’re doing is attempting to understand what I’m saying. That’s just you LISTENING to me, which is kind of boring. Like, don’t get me wrong, that act of listening to art/media can be pleasantly distracting and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. That’s essentially what watching an episode of NCIS is, I’d argue: The show knows who killed the person and you don’t and then at the end they tell you. But I think what happens when you read a book—ideally, anyway—is much more complicated and beautiful and collaborative. My intent as an author matters some, but you as the reader get some agency, too. You get to discover meaning within the story, and sometimes the meaning you discover will be meaning I hoped you would discover, and sometimes it will be meaning I could never have imagined you discovering. But together, we get to build something that matters to you (hopefully), and that brings you pleasure and consolation and a feeling of unaloneness that you can never get from merely listening.

magicalist 12y ago
Authorial intent isn't privileged in a critical reading of a text, except when you use phrases like "perhaps inspired by the Talmud", at which point you're making comments about authorial intent. I'm going to have to go with the GP on this (though the article itself isn't very good). A very large percentage of Rap Genius annotations are just useless, and that's just out of the ones that are trying to be helpful instead of making a joke or providing information that's plain wrong. Even forgiving for direct appeal to what the lyricist supposedly meant, annotations seem to jump to the very first connection the annotator thought of, and the number of annotations for the same line (and the number of votes weighing the alternative annotations) is so low that a signal isn't rising out of the noise. Maybe that's just for the entries I end up looking at on there, but they aren't exactly obscure songs.

magicalist 12y ago

Authorial intent isn't privileged in a critical reading of a text, except when you use phrases like "perhaps inspired by the Talmud", at which point you're making comments about authorial intent. I'm going to have to go with the GP on this (though the article itself isn't very good). A very large percentage of Rap Genius annotations are just useless, and that's just out of the ones that are trying to be helpful instead of making a joke or providing information that's plain wrong. Even forgiving for direct appeal to what the lyricist supposedly meant, annotations seem to jump to the very first connection the annotator thought of, and the number of annotations for the same line (and the number of votes weighing the alternative annotations) is so low that a signal isn't rising out of the noise. Maybe that's just for the entries I end up looking at on there, but they aren't exactly obscure songs.