Neil (cutting lots of interesting stuff):

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.

I'm still not sure I agree with the approach. F'rinstance, I've seen quite a few 'art' films which interviews with the directors revealed were made on stupidly low budgets and in consequence got shot in black and white, *purely* for cheapness of film and ease of editing (I wish I could think of some examples but I've thrown away all my film reviews). The results can be quite startling when you're not used to seeing b+w films in the modern idiom. It would be tempting for an unknowing critic to make out all sorts of artistic reasons for the lack of colour...

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-free reader, who can't possibly exist.

Clearly there is no absolute 'meaning'.

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.

There's a reasonable amount of fairly learned crit (well it fooled me, anyway) of LotR, which is certainly more popular than 'high'.

Some subgenres of fanfic are wide open to that kind of treatment.

I'm guessing here, but I suspect one problem with studying fanfic in this way is that writers, not unnaturally, feel threatened by the view that their creations might not be high quality. Actually, as I've said before, I think an awful lot of B7 fanfiction is exceptionally high quality.

Recent high-intensity exposure to amateur non-fanfiction writing has only increased my appreciation of the fanfic.

Tavia