Re: Try listening to the real ideas and ignore vitriolic attacks

Just spend a little time actually and intelligently pursuing "what the
author meant when he/she was writing" and, if you're honest, you'll run
into all kinds of factual, logical, and simply logistical contradictions
and other problems.

I know, I tried it for years.

Then I woke up to what I was really doing. It wasn't about reading the
author's mind at the precise moment he/she penned the text -- heck,
often, authors don't even know themselves what they're trying to say
until after they've written. It was about placing the writing in a
specific cultural and linguistic context, one co-extensive with the
author. It became not about what the author may have thought while
writing, but about what the author as the reader of his/her own text may
think about that text as a reader -- and of course this widens out into
pretty much any intelligent reader of the time whose paid attention to
the author's text.

So this is a social construct -- not an island of existence. These
islands are really created by locating textual meaning in the isolated,
unseen mind of the author at the precise moment of writing.

Please note there's nothing even remotely Derridean about this process.

Jim

Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE wrote:

>Here is a glimpse of the feet. The method of reasoning looks at the whole
>process of literature from one side, the receiving end. The process has a
>giving end. The modern view assumes that the only observable or accessible
>part of the black box is the receiving end. Yes we may not ever get to know
>exactly what an author means but when he wrote he usually meant something or
>somethings. I as a writer and a reader am acutely aware of this and I know
>that there was something that stirred the heart and mind before the pen
>moved and this is what I am after. I am not sure what the options are as
>far as theories go out there but the apparent impossible nature of knowing
>what an author means does not detract me from my quest. I may be wrong but
>I seek none the less. When I mentioned the attic in the previous post I was
>talking about knowing something more than what I already do as part of the
>motivation to read (communicate), I see this with my daughter (just 1 year
>old), she sometimes behaves very shockingly (pleasantly) and I know that she
>is learning strange new things from here Egyptian nanny, she often says
>words in Arabic. She got them from somewhere and despite the fact that, at
>first, I thought it was babble it had meaning that meant something to more
>than her. The multiple readings you speak of may be laid before me I still
>must choose one or some and what criteria do I use to choose? That is the
>question. The 'as many readings as there are readers' may start the show
>but which one or ones were there at the beginning. Some of these readings
>can be set aside but it never changes the fact that an intended meaning was
>implanted at the origin. We know this because we know writers and are
>writers ourselves. These modern theories (the little that I know of) seem
>to try and cut everyone off into mere islands of existence. Your theories
>may be about formulating the criteria but just because the meaning is not
>easily unmixed from the dough ball, it did go in there in the beginning, I
>know because I put it there. Can meaning disappear? I guess it can but
>that is the author's hope, that it does get through. That is the hope in
>all communication. The idea that man has so radically changed over time
>that meaning becomes completely unattainable seems again to be rooted in the
>modernist progressive assumptions. Here's an assumption to chew on:
>relationships are.
>
>Daniel
>
>

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Thu Mar 6 10:41:03 2003