Re: ars longa

J J R (jrovira@juno.com)
Tue, 24 Nov 1998 18:06:26 -0500 (EST)

Yeah, to be honest, those types of games don't appeal to me either.  I
consider it as much an obscenity as a computer generated poem.  It seems
pointless to even look at it.

So for all my distancing from authorial intent as the ground of meaning
in literature, I still value literature because it comes from one
particular person who wrote at one particular time and in one particular
place.  Trying to read a work as a member of that particular time and
place is what people really do when they talk about authorial intent--and
that, to me, is just taking a reader out of one reading community and
placing him in another.

A good example of this in action is, again, CS Lewis.  He said that
people who said the 7th ring in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy
represented the nuclear bomb were wrong.  Tolkein didn't have that in
mind because he conceived the idea before there were any nuclear bombs. 
This is people ascribing to the author a particular intent that was
chronologically impossible.  This is a reading we get when we keep the
trilogy in the reading community from which it was generated.

But that doesn't mean that in some ways the ring can't inform our
knowledge of nuclear weapons and the role they play in the modern world. 
  

Jim

On Tue, 24 Nov 1998 08:15:00 +0000 Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie>
writes:
>
>    Surely the whole point of the Ern Malley episode was that 
>    the critics who projected meanings onto the poems were seen 
>    to be the idiots.  And, unless I'm mistaken, that was the joker's
>    'intention' in the first place.
>
>    They were fundamentally the same kind of idiots who hail 
>    computer generated pictures or the daubs of chimpanzees 
>    as works of art.  A landscape or a piquant human face may 
>    arouse all kinds of emotions but they cannot be regarded 
>    as pieces of art until an individual human mind has deliberately 
>    worked to transform them into something else altogether. 
>
>    That intended outcome by one man or woman is what 
>    qualifies it to be even considered as an art work.  (And 
>    don't talk to me about the moving effects achieved by 
>    the commuinal improvisations of the local student theatre group.)
>
>    Scottie B.
>
>
>

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