Wheee! Theoretical debates! <bounce bounce>
----- Original Message ----- From: Neil Faulkner N.Faulkner@tesco.net
However, this strikes me as effectively impossible to do. Whenever you
read
a programme or watch a book, you cannot avoid bringing in some of the surrounding context. For instance, if I watch *Casablanca,* I can try to disregard everything but the film itself... but the fact remains that I
know
when 1943 was, I know where Africa is, I know who the Germans are, and I know why they happened to be in Africa at that time. If I could shut all
of
these side points out of my mind entirely (which I can't), all I would
see
would be a sequence of one picture following another.
I think that's a slight misinterpretation of what Calle said.
Understanding
Casablanca requires an awareness of the city's status in 1943 amid the war in North Africa, because that is the situation in the film. What Calle means is forget that the film was *made* in 1943, that it came from a Hollywood studio, starred whoever, was directed by Michael Curtiz etc.
OK, fair enough-- but again, I still hold that that information is also pretty much impossible to get out of your mind. It may be possible to, say, find someone who has no idea who Michael Curtiz was, what Hollywood is, etc.-- and I'd be really interested to see what they had to say about Casablanca--but not, I think, in the lit- or film-crit world, and in my experience, prior knowledge still tends to bias one.
(actually, anthropologist Nigel Barley does have a small piece about the time a kindly-intentioned missionary showed the [fairly culturally isolated] West African tribe with which he works a Tom and Jerry film, and how he went around the next day trying to learn their interpretation of it. All he learned was that most of them had in fact ignored the film in favour of gossip or other activities :)...)
Parallell example: in anthropology, the postmodernist movement went through a phase of arguing that anthropological attempts to extrapolate from data were "stifling informants' voices," and, instead, advocated getting one's informants to give one their life history and writing it up as a sort of biography. They promptly ran into trouble-- because when you get down to that, even the very act of approaching someone to ask for their life history is going to affect the way it comes out, to say nothing of the editing process etc.
Though Umberto Eco has had a bit of fun with postulating the kind of interpretations bits of popular culture might get when divorced from
common
contextual understanding:
So does Peter Ackroyd in "The Plato Papers." His take on Alfred Hitchcock's "Frenzy" as divorced from context is both funny and disturbing.
I think the process you're referring to is essentially that of
Author + Noise --> Text --> Reader + Noise --> Reading
where 'noise' is all the impedimenta interfering with either creation or interpretation, whether it's limitations of ability, cultural constraints, or some bloke from Porlock knocking on the door.
Which leads to the question of where meaning actually resides. In the author? No, because authorial meaning is inevitably altered in the act of authorship. In the reader? No again, because no two readers can be guaranteed to extract the same meaning. In the text itself? Not even there, because its extraction depends on an ideal noise-fre reader, who can't possibly exist.
Personally I think it is hiding behind the fridge.
Absolutely :).
Basically, by this analysis a Mills and Boon romance is every bit as literarily valid as a Shakespeare play. Which is something I've never been able to accept--
and
frankly, very few English departments seem to be teaching First-Year
Mills
and Boon, despite the litcrit movement.
Actually I find it very easy to put high literature and popular
literature.
Why shouldn't you be able to interpret a M&B in the same way you would,
say,
a Bronte novel? They've both got plot, characters, setting and areas of emphasis.
Actually, that's something that I think should be done, and advocate for repeatedly-- my first-year final paper, for my masters' thesis, was an analysis of the soap opera "Howards' Way" as a cultural text, which opened with a paragraph pointing out exactly *why* it was valid to interpret a soap in this way. The first thing the examiner said in the viva-voce was "Well, Ms Moore, you obviously *enjoyed* writing this paper..." in a voice which made it plain that she thought that no one should enjoy writing a first-year masters' paper. Still, she had to admit it was anthropologically sound, and gave me a good pass...
Unfortunately, though, Neil, English departments are a bit less enlightened than we are :(.
Though most of the criticism of popular literature that I've read has treated it as generic, and looked for generic conventions.
This is true, though it is getting better. There's a bloke at my uni writing a doctoral thesis on Philip K. Dick, although it has to be said he's getting a fair bit of scorn from his colleagues...
Some subgenres of fanfic are wide open to that kind of treatment.
Neil, if we did, we'd get lynched :).
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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