Re: The last Logos; An Iceberg Full-On

First, Ben, with your Salinger question, you may want to check Salinger.org and
see what you can find there. There's quite a bit of bibliographic information
on that site if I remember right. Welcome to the list.

Daniel said:

> This
> reasonable-ness is subject to whom ever is defining the limits of meaning.
> There is no falsification, there is no repeatability there is no parsimony.
> It all comes down to who has the most charisma, or attitude, or who can yell
> the loudest or claim the most authority.
>

That's a legitimate criticism, but in some ways it's asking something of my
ideas that I'm not attempting to provide. Let me refer you to an older critic,
I.A. Richards. He published several books, two of them titled _Principles of
Literary Criticism_ and _Practical Criticism_.

My ideas fall into the first category, and I think you're asking for the second.

"Reasonableness" is a vague criteria, yes. But I don't think that means I'm
saying a literary text "can mean anything a reader wants it to mean," or that
this is the natural result of my ideas. I think it's fair to say that if
someone were to argue that Joyce's _Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man_ ended
by showing Stephen's conscious, renewed commitment to Catholicism, they'd be
wrong.

What I'm trying to do is link a prior person/culture/history/sometimes even
language with a current reader (who may be reading according to a number of
criteria), and am defining the literary text as the link itself. Texts both
come from somewhere and go to somewhere. This isn't so much a methodology but a
few ideas to keep in mind. The reader defines the methodology, these ideas are
supposed to describe the relationship between texts and all methodologies,
actually, even highly personal and unconscious ones.

The advantage/disadvantage is that it keeps any one reader from saying, "this
reading is the final reading." It reminds us that every reading of every text
is the product of certain assumptions, some foreign to the text, some not, and
that readings are the product of applying these assumptions to a specific text.
The results are the product of the interaction of text and assumption or
methodology. So meaning can't be just anything -- I don't think that people who
say "infinite" numbers of readings of a text are possible really have any clue
about the meaning of the word "infinite."

Yes, criticism is an art form, but I'm trying to describe how the process works,
not present a how-to.

Jim

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Received on Sun Mar 9 17:14:30 2003