Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

Responses below:

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> That's an interesting idea, but I really don't think it can hold up. This
> idea that's been springing up, that everything (or nearly so) is dependent
> upon and defined by culture and custom seems exaggerated to me. These
> things certainly have a profound influence, but they do not absolutely
> determine everything. I cannot imagine that a reasonable person can sustain
> such a belief through the careful reading of varied texts from far-ranging
> times and cultures. It soon becomes plainly evident that we all really do
> share much more than separates us, and what we share provides a very
> substantial context.

I agree with the sentiment, but it carries a danger, too -- the assumption that
what you really have in common with past thinkers/writers is what you think you
share with them. I've found that the deeper I research something, the more
surprised I am by the places I find the similarities and differences.

I'm not a Foucauldian because I don't think the individual self is completely
dependent upon cultural and historical forces. I agree with you there.

But I'm not talking, or was ever talking, about the individual self. I was
always talking about _written language_. You tend to confuse the two, robbie,
and partly because you think meaning is dependent upon authorial intent.

> My assertion was not that reading more books is unhelpful to understanding
> one book, but only that I can understand Hamlet without reading Professor
> X's Elizabethan cultural and historical hypothesizing.

No one ever asserted that you "can't understand Hamlet without reading Professor
X's etc..."

I asserted that you can't understand -- pay very careful attention --

How Shakespeare understood Hamlet (Shakespeare's Authorial Intent) without
understanding Shakespeare's culture.

I went a step further to argue that you can't ever get to Shakespeare's
authorial intent at all, but through historical and cultural research MAYBE come
up with a few ideas about how a person like him may have read that text.

Notice, again, I'm referring to the written text and not Shakespeare himself.

The problem is not with the claim to understand Hamlet, but to understand what
Shakespeare was thinking, exactly, when he wrote Hamlet.

> Certainly I will
> understand such a Great text imperfectly, and certainly I will comes to see
> more in it with each reading over years and decades, but by reading
> Shakespeare's words and ONLY Shakespeare's words, something of Shakespeare's
> ACTUAL MEANING will reach me. Not his Whole And Final Meaning, mind you,
> but something that he did actually put into words will actually come out
> sensible to me on the other end.

There's no question about you understanding the words written on the page. It's
a matter of HOW you understand the words written on the page, and whether or not
you are justified in claiming that YOUR understanding of the words on the page
is the same, or similar to, Shakespeare's himself.

That's what you claim when you claim knowledge of authorial intent.

Question:

Some people 100 years ago thought Shakespeare's Othello was a morality play
describing what happens to a young girl who disobeys her father's orders.

No one today would think that. Or very few.

Further question:

Which side is Shakespeare on, and why? And how do you know?

Jim

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Received on Sat Oct 26 09:02:45 2002