Re: I'll tell you what it's all about....
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sat, 21 Nov 1998 12:20:06 +1100
> Having had no contact with academic linguistics before joining
> mailing lists such as this one, I was bemused, amused, amazed by
> the evidently fashionable view that the interpretation of a text
> or the projection onto it of private fantasies by any jumped-up
> Tom, Dick or Harriet is potentially as valid as that intended by
> its author.
No, no ... this is not what `we' - us unpopular postmodernists - have being
saying at all (at least not me) I'm simply proposing that every text
relates to every reader differently - as I said, everyone's Seymour is
different, everyone's perception is shaped by a million different things.
Thus, the text itself is enacted by all those things, including, and not
discounting, the author him or herself who of course makes a contribution
but whose contribution is in the end simply another view to add to the
others. It's a little like the old fable of the five blind women who want
to know what an elephant looks like - one finds the tale and thinks it's
like a snake, one finds the leg and thinks it's like a tree, and so on.
Only collectively do they create and enact the elephant.
Yours with extreme impudence,
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest