meta: if authorial intent dies in a fire, does anyone even notice?

[angearia]

I have this button called "Authorial Intent" and whenever someone pushes that button to dismiss a reader's interpretation or to question the value of even bothering to offer interpretation, it sends me off into a tailspin of discourse on the value of authorial intent and the reader's participation in the process of creating meaning in fiction. So,

Comments

[local_max]

<3

More at some point (either here or on BF, I'm not sure which).

[angearia]

<3

Ta, looking forward to your thoughts

[norwie2010]

When you see the author prick a finger and paint a pattern in the divining bowl, the author then hands that bowl over to you to divine meaning in the patterns. Only people cannot understand from a distance, cannot divine without joining in. Blood calls to blood. So you prick your own finger and trace the pattern in the bowl, and you try to read the author as you try to read yourself, as you've both spilled yourselves into the fiction.

Now you've got me all hot and bothered....

(It is 4 in the morning over here - more braiiiiins! As Max does, i'm bowing out for now and try to come back tomorrow. Lovely thoughts! :-))

[angearia]

How like me to give you ~thoughts when you should be sleeping!

[catteo]

Your brain astounds me.

Carry on.

[angearia]

♥

[shipperx]

So you know, posting this sent me to look for what may have started the convo. :)

And, yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I do take authorial intent into question. It's good to know. But that doesn't mean that the author doesn't put many things into a work, or that they don't put a whole lot of things they don't recognize in a piece of work. Still, whether they recognize it or not, it may still be there.

It's like an argument I got into on some board where a poster said that something couldn't be racist unless the writer/artist intended it to be. Bull! I said. Racists think they're 'right', they don't think they're being racist. D.W.Griffith wouldn't have called "Birth of a Nation" racist, but it sure as hell IS racist!

[angearia]

I do question and consider authorial intent, too. I like keeping it on the board to play with, but only when I feel like I actually have the opportunity to get to know the author beyond the story.

And yeah, when you think about analyzing literature from centuries or even millennia ago, authorial intent can only go so far. It becomes far more important to know the intent of the language of that time period, the social customs, the reigning philosophy of the day.

Another thing to consider regarding AtS is how what's written further down the line reflects back upon what was written before. So all the darkness and obvious subverting of Angel as a tried and true hero in the later seasons makes IWRY's straight-up hero presentation seem almost satirical. Same behavior, only the narrative later acknowledges the darkness.

[beer_good_foamy]

When you see the author prick a finger and paint a pattern in the divining bowl, the author then hands that bowl over to you to divine meaning in the patterns. Only people cannot understand from a distance, cannot divine without joining in. Blood calls to blood. So you prick your own finger and trace the pattern in the bowl, and you try to read the author as you try to read yourself, as you've both spilled yourselves into the fiction.

And that's what we've all got running in our veins. (Alternate metaphor: And then the sharks show up and the feeding frenzy starts.)

I'm not sure what caused this, and I'm not sure I want to know, but I like it.

[angearia]

(The alternate metaphor sounds messy.)

Nothing specifically caused this so much as any and every 'authorial intent' discussion where I want to toss my hands up because it feels like being told, well just go home, don't bother showing up, don't bother reading/watching/thinking, just wait for the author to tell you the point in the DVD commentary.

[local_max]

I hope Emmie doesn't mind me stepping in!

one proximate starting point:

~is Angel a jerk in I Will Remember You because of bad writing, or because of good writing of Angel being a jerk?~

but I think different people were all coming at the Authorial Intent question about that from different angles.

[beer_good_foamy]

I would say it's an example of pretty good writing of a concept that's not very well thought through.

(Then again, I also never got the point of deferring to authorial intent; I love to examine authorial intent and how it translates into a work of fiction, but I don't think it gets a say in what meaning I should take away from it; if that were the case, I wouldn't bother with fiction at all. I don't love Buffy because of what Joss intended, I love Buffy for the work of fiction it was.)