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Reading this summer
rynne:
Granted, I haven't read a lot of it and I'm no literary theorist, but the few post-structuralist criticisms I've read struck me as some of the most masturbatory intellectualism I could imagine: more about how deliciously clever the critic could be than about relaying any kind of interesting insight to the work in question.
Are there any post-structralist criticisms that might appeal to a "common" reader, or are they pretty much all like that? I'd like to read a something that's considered a good example of the technique before dismissing it completely.
Jackie Blue:
Demonstrating how clever the critic can be is unfortunately the hallmark of most criticism (see: Richard Dawkins. Zinger!)
rynne:
Ah, so true! :lol: I guess what I don't like about post-structuralism is that it seems to decouple the demonstration of the critic's cleverness from any actual analysis of the text. Instead of being clever by looking at the text in a unique way, the post-structuralist criticisms I've read treated the text as a sort of free-associative springboard for any kind of riffing they felt like. Which I (think I) understand is the whole point. But if that's the case, I'd be more than happy to avoid it from now on.
But yeah, I would be interested in giving it another shot if someone would point me to a stand-out example.
loam:
--- Quote from: zerodrone on 12 Jun 2008, 11:22 ---I think that forced, academic analysation can definitely make a book less enjoyable.
But I certainly have a running background process by which I analyse any and everything I see, including books I read. At least half the time I'm wondering about things in the text that reveal an author's unconcious or unintentional subtext, such as the (ugh) Wheel of Time books and the rampant misogyny. Or, to be charitable, not technically misogyny so much as wildly delusional beliefs about women and their actions and motivations.
--- End quote ---
I completely agree and was of course overstating my case a bit for dramatic effect... You can't help but analyse as you read, and I certainly enjoy discussing the things I read, listen to, or watch - but I was unfortunately subjected to some lit classes in college that haunt my thoughts to this day. I can completely imagine spending an entire quarter trying to pretend like we're finding deep meaning in the Hitchhiker's Guide. Ugh.
a pack of wolves:
--- Quote from: jimbunny on 12 Jun 2008, 09:29 ---Mrrr...close reading, intertextuality, and contextualisation are not going out of style anytime soon, bub. Not even necessarily talking about an author, yet. And not to slight anyone's knowledge of literary theory, but what is it with this board and "The Death of the Author" (it's the title of an essay by Roland Barthes, for those of you who haven't caught on yet)? Sure, it's figured heavily into a lot of post-structuralism, but that's not the only ballgame out there. Look around, you'll find essays purporting "The Death of the Reader" and even "The Death of the Text." Not much left after that. Personally, I can't help feeling that approaches that completely eliminate authorial intention, though I understand their merits and why they developed, always seem either a little arrogant, or too stuck up their own asses to state simply what should be obvious.
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I wasn't suggesting they were going out of style, and The Death of the Author is all about intertextuality anyway. I was just talking about those approaches that focus on the idea of a hidden meaning implanted there by the author being the most important thing when looking at a text being rather old-fashioned. And post-sctructuralism might not be the only ballgame out there, but Barthes work took the focus away from the author and placed it onto the text itself, and I think the importance of that is huge.
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