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What are you currently reading?
JD:
--- Quote from: Jeans on 21 Jan 2011, 03:17 ---A History of Western Philosophy
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I will be reading that soonish, whenever I finish Russell's Best.
Inlander:
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 29 Jan 2011, 21:04 ---We can only really claim to have an idea of what the author intends the messave of their work to be through cultural, linguistic and metatextual clues outside of the text itself
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I'm sorry but as a life-long reader this strikes me as manifestly untrue. Reading is a skill like any other and those who are practiced in it - as everyone participating in this thread surely is - should be able to identify what point (if any) an author is trying to make in his or her writing with relative ease. Of course we're free to add our own intepretations and doing so will even enhance our experience of the text but the idea that the author is simply a vessel through which the words pour is ridiculous. Perhaps I'm occupying an unusual position in that I've written many tens of thousands of words of fiction over the last decade or more and I spend a large amount of time thinking very seriously and in great depth about the craft as well as the art of writing, but if a writer is unable to convey their intentions clearly to the reader then the writer has failed in their chosen field of endeavour.
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 29 Jan 2011, 21:04 ---And what about the sections of Shakespeares plays written entirely to amuse the cheap seats.
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What about them? They're sections, as you say, not the whole. Surely you're not suggesting that we start isolating particular excerpts from a piece of writing and start considering them as if they were a whole and complete text?
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 29 Jan 2011, 21:04 ---What of the endless words Dickens churned out mostly to meet publishers deadlines.
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Maybe they're not "literary" by my definition. That doesn't mean that Dickens isn't a "literary" writer. Graham Greene famously divided his novels into "novels" and "entertainments".
StaedlerMars:
I've just finished A Feast For Crows and the first volume of Sandman, and have started reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles. The first two were good, and I'm enjoying Chronicles so far, really like the way he's written it.
elizaknowswhatshesfor:
I have just read the books that Homicide Life on The Streets, The Corner & of course The Wire were based on. They were tirelessly brilliant in tone style & honesty.
I'm finding choosing other books quite hard work since reading them as everything falls flat.
I followed it up with Iain Banks' Canal Dreams. Which I found quite weak & nowhere near his best work.
I have also read the Adventures of Huck Finn & Sense & Sensibility (I have decided I do not like Austin, not one bit)
Funnily enough, baring in mind some the discussion in the thread. I am trying not to read any Sci Fi or Horror based books until after my birthday in April. Not for any reason except I like to push myself to read as many different types of book as possible.
I would like some suggestions for good Non Fiction or Fiction books. Of any kind (Although having read through most of the thread I may have to get on Amazon....)
EDIT: Ignore me I have just found the recommendations thread. I will go in there....
KharBevNor:
--- Quote from: Inlander on 29 Jan 2011, 23:57 --- if a writer is unable to convey their intentions clearly to the reader then the writer has failed in their chosen field of endeavour.
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I think this is a very narrow idea indeed. Surely this is a difference between fiction and non-fiction. Much art arises out of a failure to be able to clearly communicate. Furthermore, I think you're fundamentally wrong; the text itself cannot reliably communicate the authors intentions. Even the most straightforward text can be interpreted in a huge number of ways: as a code, as an allegory, using a marxist reading or a feminist reading. Winnie the Pooh can be about the class system or spiritual enlightenment or whatever, depending on how the reader chooses to see it. The intention of the author is a fact that is extrinsic to the text itself; even if it is stated in the text we do not actually know the authors intention, we only know the authors stated intention. It becomes clear, in fact, that the stated or presented intention is all the intention we can ever know, if we know the intention at all. Thus, plainly the idea of intention is meaningless; it is the relationship between the reader and the text that is important, as it is the only one that we, as the critic/reader, actually understand, at least in the single special case of our own relationship with a text. An author can call his works whatever the hell he wants, but if a reader can read a book that has been called mere 'entertainment' and comes away enlightened, and if a reader can read a book that is supposed to be full of some deep, considered meaning and is merely entertained, or bored shitless, then we can see the idea is completely false. It relies on an insupportable intellectual premise.
EDIT:
--- Quote from: Inlander on 29 Jan 2011, 23:57 ---What about them? They're sections, as you say, not the whole. Surely you're not suggesting that we start isolating particular excerpts from a piece of writing and start considering them as if they were a whole and complete text?
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Not exactly. It raises another enormous flaw in your argument though. How do you judge the overall quality of a work which contains supposedly 'literary' and 'non-literary' segments? If a novel contains 10 chapters of 'non-literature' and one chapter of 'literature' is the overall result 'literature' or does the 'literature' content have to be over a certain level. Bringing up things like this exposes the terrible weakness of the definition you're trying to make.
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