Re: Authorial Intent

Robbie, you can make assertions all day long, but assertions are not argument --
and you didn't address my argument at all.

If you want to know the meaning of Achilles' Shield in Homer's writing, do you
ask Homer, or do you study his writing? What, then is the real issue?

We can take for granted that works of literature are intentional products. But
with your training you should know better than to assume that a reader living
thousands of years after Homer would read Homer's text the same way Homer did.

You surely have seen yourself the problem readings created by people reading
Homer with Christian ethics and values in mind. I don't think we can read him
properly without trying to purge our minds of 2000 years of history, if you want
a reading that's even remotely faithful to Homer.

That takes a lot of work.

Jim

PS The liberal arts education you describe is alive and well and thriving only
in universities where the humanities are still respected. My two universities
were good old liberal arts universities and require all their students to study
math, science, theater, art, or music, along with literature, politics, and
history (this is all in addition to the chosen majors). I had math through
first year calculus, studied theater (I fear I have NO musical capacity at all
so I avoided those classes), took a good 10 or more hours of science courses in
addition to my major.

But this only happens, again, where humanities people are in charge, not where
people like the computer geek who wrote that essay are in charge. In those
institutions the humanities run on a shoestring sufficient to meet state
requirements (where they exist) while the science budgets are fat and happy --
and I suspect the author's attitude serves the purpose, at least in part, of
continuing this state of affairs.

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> Jim says that authorial intent is a complete dead-end, that seeking it
> requires holding a set of critical assumptions that "just aren't held
> anymore."
>
> Yet it appears to me to be overwhelmingly the case that Homer did not write
> the Iliad accidentally. Truly Great Books are not mistakes. I realize that
> you did not assert the contrary, but it does seem to me that something like
> it must be lurking for such a bold rejection of the relevance of authorial
> intent. Unless a Great and Timeless thing was a slip of the pen, surely
> the deliberate author is not irrelevant. If I am not permitted to ask,
> "What did Homer mean by this?" then I am disallowed to know Homer
> and disallowed to know his poems.
>
> I suppose it is right to say that we can't KNOW the author's intent,
> certainly not with so rigorous an understanding of knowing as we get from,
> say, Socrates. All he knew was that he knew nothing, or so he reportedly
> said. We can use this to reject quite nearly anything.
>
> But I need not read archaeological or biographical theories or
> presumptions -- get boggled down with still further Not Quite Knowing -- to
> puzzle over the significance of Achilles' Shield. Homer presents the shield
> in a puzzling way, he says puzzling things about it. He certainly meant
> something, perhaps several things. I need only go to Homer, and ideally
> also to other sincere and thoughtful readers, to puzzle out what. I suppose
> I will never KNOW, but neither will the historian or the biographer. Homer
> was, after all, writing for us. If we listen sensitively, he tells us what
> he needs us to know. SOMETIMES historical or biographical things become
> very important, but I do expect that these times are usually in less Great
> books or less Great parts of books. Even then an occasional footnote can do
> the trick, and if we're especially lucky, it will only refer us to another
> writer contemporary to the fellow we're reading. The truly Great stuff is
> written for me just as much as for some fellow in the author's time and
> place, and it describes something just as true for me.
>
> I do not mean to say, by all of this, that we should not involve ourselves
> in historical research; but only that reading books IS historical research,
> and that being sensitive to authorial intent is in fact quite important.
>
> -robbie
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Received on Thu Oct 24 11:22:58 2002