"Kathryn" == Kathryn Andersen kat@welkin.apana.org.au writes:
Warning: I spent three years studying LitCrit at the University.
On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 03:54:18PM +0200, Natasa Tucev wrote:
Well, literary criticism tends to be rather heedless of the author's conscious intentions.
Which is why I've never had much respect for Literary Criticism.
A work has a context, and part of that context is the author.
True.
Yes, an author's intended message isn't usually what the audience hears, but it still is an important factor.
Is it? Why?
The way I was taught, the authors intentions are not always disregarded, but they are *always* viewed with great suspicion. There are reasons for this. The more important ones are:
* The work the author sees is never the same work the reader sees, even if they're looking at the same physical object. The authors view of her own work is unavoidably tainted by her own vision of what she wanted to accomplish, she tends to see the Platonically ideal work rather than the actual work. Differently put, while the reader gets the text and only the text, the author gets the text and all her memories of what she was thinking while she produced the text. The result is that the author's opinions are really opinions about a different work from the one the readers see.
* Authors are not reliable sources about their own intentions. They are human, and they tend to want to be seen in as good a light as possible. Therefore, they often claim far more noble intentions than they really had, and far more "elevated" inspirations and sources than they really had. If you were to believe what the authors themselves say, nobody has ever written a novel because they wanted to make money, and nobody has ever been inspired into writing by Stephen King or Barbara Cartland. Almost invariably, they claim to want to say important things about the human condition and to have been inspired by James Joyce and Marcel Proust. In the long run, this gets rather hard to swallow.
What you're saying here seems to be that Literary Criticism wishes that works of art didn't have authors at all, or that who wrote it is irrelevant.
No, but Literary Criticism prefers to talk about things that are at least theoretically knowable. Once we get telepathic scanners capable of looking back in time, *then* we can talk about the author's intentions. Until then, we chose to disregard statements that are unavoidably tainted by ambition, greed and fallible memory.
Which is ridiculous! Or we wouldn't have spent so many interesting hours discussing Ben Steed -- or the differences between Terry Nation and Chris Boucher...
Do we really *discuss* Ben Steed's intentions that often? Occasionally, we speculate on what they may have been, but that is more of morbid curiosity, I think.
And I do not think we discuss the differences between Terry Nation and Chris Boucher. I mean, really, what would that be about? "Well, Terry is dead and Chris is not"?
We *do* discuss the differences in the *works* of Terry Nation and Chris Boucher -- and *that* is interesting. There we can actually say things, like for example that Boucher's works tend to be rather a lot darker and more pessimistic than Nation's. This is something we can discuss. This is something that is drawn from the sources available to us.
Discussing the Freudian imagery of a work may be an amusing game, but it can't tell you what it means, any more than phrenology will tell you what a person is like.
A lot of silly things are done in LitCrit (and is it even possible to use Freud and *not* be silly?), but I think you are generalising a bit much here.