Re: The real problem...

You know, John has a point about this being a long paragraph about how
you're not going to cite any of the texts :).

But I respect that you're more interested in talking about authorial
intent now than you are in talking about Derrida. So responses below.

Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE wrote:

>If our comments were directed at Derrida the person then there is no
>rational reason to direct anyone to texts since the author as a source of
>meaning is unattainable.
>

No one said "the author as a source of meaning is unattainable." I said
authorial intent is just a guess. Sometimes we have nothing but their
works of fiction to make our guesses (Shakespeare), sometimes we have
the author's own comments about their writing (Derrida).

I've said other times, way back, that we very seldom do the work
necessary to really determine authorial intent when we read any text
(such as read all the author's texts, letters, a couple good
biographies, and study him in his original language), so that the
determination of the author's probable intent isn't really what's going
on when we read. It's really just us and the words in front of us.

> I contend that there is a direct discernable link by degree
>

Funny, so did John in a very recent post. What I've said in the past
was that authorial intent was a matter of probability, that the author's
own reading of a work is just one possible reading of a work (not
necessarily the best one either -- how do you know the author isn't
lying?), but not that there's no direct link at all.

> but until the source of meaning is agreed upon Jim, a debate about
>meaning be it exclusively in the text or traceably from the author is
>meaningless.
>

I think if you were to quote Derrida directly then provide your reading
of the quote, I think you'd find that people will respond to you on the
basis of the text itself and maybe even approach it in a way you might
agree with.

Do you really think that if we all agreed that authorial intent was the
ground of textual meaning that we'd agree upon the meaning of any text?
You really think that? It's never happened in the past, when people did
define meaning in terms of authorial intent.

> You and John operate in this world we share as if there is a
>direct discernable link between the two but you rationally argue against
>contrary to both of your berating.
>

You only think we do because you don't really understand or have very
carefully read either his or my posts.

> What reference Derrida or any links
>among his texts if he does not matter? If there is no link then signatures
>mean squiggly lines and Derrida is a label for a group of literature and no
>more and if authorial intent has no impact concerning meaning for the reader
>then comparing texts and extracting meaning because arbitrary because all
>you are doing is combining to texts with their own fields of meanings in to
>a new text with a different field of meaning but this combining for the
>reader does not increase in any way they likelihood of better understanding
>since it is just a new hybrid text with it own latent unanchored meanings.
>

Even when meaning is "anchored," Daniel, in a person or in history, it
tends to get a bit squiggly. This depends on the type of text we're
dealing with, though. Chemical formulas are less squiggly than
non-fiction prose, non-fiction tends to be less squiggly than fiction,
and prose fiction tends to be less squiggly than most poetry (at least
in English). When I was having this discussion with Robbie way back we
were using Homer (ancient Greek poetry) and Salinger (Americanese prose
fiction) as test subjects. In my opinion, both are pretty squiggly
because we have none to not too much direct explanation of the author's
works by the author himself.

Jim

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Received on Fri Aug 15 21:31:14 2003