/lit/ - Literature

>>6431508

>>6431508
Yeah, I think they're giving the author of that image too much credit

It's probably written by a troll or a moron who never heard of the death of the author

>>6431508

Death of the author mother fucker

And there are people on /r9k/ who have six figure jobs.
>>6431514
I really really want to eat a romantic candlelit dinner in Florence with Annie Clark.
Is castration the answer to this problem?

there are people on /lit/ who are deeply concerned with other's opinions and feel they must rouse some kind of trouble in order to establish some sense of self worth and/or believe they reside in the literary elite/"patrician" class.

>>6431518
Or they don't take pomo garbage seriously.

>>6431508
Holding a naive view of fiction (or texts in general) is a form of anti-intellectualism.

>>6431518
>Yeah, I think they're giving the author of that image too much credit
The image transcends its author's intent

>>6431527
there are undergrads shitposting on /lit/

>>6431530

IE A moron

>>6431508
there are people on lit who think what the author meant matters

only middle schoolers and stem undergrads in community college think this image isn't stupid

>>6431537
that's not how this works, you have to post something someone else is doing, not what you're doing. But keep trying.

>>6431535
Exactly, playing pretend does harm.

>>6431552
there are 18 y/o seniors shitposting on /lit/

>>6431539
Internet Explorer A moron?

>>6431547
There are "people" on /lit/ who think it doesn't.

unless youre trying to academically study a book who cares what the author intended? if you can gain some insight from metaphorical cloud gazing then great!

>>6431564

It's a shit browser. So yes.

Interpreting a text is rarely ever about what the creator meant, and mostly about studying the way you take the signs offered to you and what kind of associations make for their meaning to you.

What your English teacher says is not what the author meant, but neither he/she or you have any business with what he meant to say, because you have something much more palpable in your hands: what he actually said. Your teacher, being somewhat well-read and more experienced(at least more than you pleb highschooler) will obviously be more sensible to these associations, first because his library is more extensive, second because he is interested in the text and thus he doesn't mind talking and thinking about it. The student, however, who is not interested at all, won't catch or even try to catch any meaning from said text, specially anything that demands any work. The student will see his teacher's attempt to provoke the students as mindless rambling and "overinterpreting" the work, because he doesn't see the connection, the text and what the teacher interpret as text appear as two separate thing that need to coincide to make sense. As if the teacher was working on a guessing game to call what the author meant with what he said and not analyzing how the effect of the text (that already happened, even though it is null to the student) can be tracked down to this or that sign.

>>6431508
You pretty much described everyone here.

>An author tells a story and readers interpret through it the prism of their own lives

>YOU PLEB, THERE IS ONLY ONE MEANING TO THIS STORY AND IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS I'M NOT GOING TO EXPLAIN IT FOR YOU. IDIOT

There are so many people on here that think you're an idiot for believing that a story is just a story.

>>6431584
That's why everyone in the thread is rambling about muh dead author.

>>6431577
O! Here comes Foucault!
Shitposting is his milieu
Free trite opinions!

What your teacher thinks: "The dog represents faith, loyalty, and the decline of Odysseus' household."
What the author meant: "The dog died because it was fucking old."

>>6431591

Do you actually use internet explorer

>>6431508
Why did they use a venn diagram?

>>6431536
a person can be anti-intellectual, but an image can not be. It might be interpreted as anti-intellectual, but that's not an inherent quality of the image.

>>6431527
/thread

>>6431596

>>6431599
I don't think this is true, anti-intellectualism is a position that can be part of the message conveyed by an image.

>>6431570
you poor, poor plebeian

>>6431605

Get a better browser smdh

>>6431598
a lot of people seem to have hardship understanding the concept of the venn diagram, a concept that is thaught in elementary schools and that even a moron like me who struggles with simple operations understands. at some point there were so many webcomics with wrong venn diagrams that some other webcomic made a webcomic about bad venn diagram webcomics.

>>6431605
>using a buggy browser with almost no support, well known security exploits, and a stale interface
Were you the anon using BitTorrent?

I remember one time when an published author who had Rimbaud as his profile picture on facebook shared that image through 9gag.

>>6431621

>>6431663

My friend shared this yesterday but I couldn't think of anything snappy to say that wouldn't make me look like a complete tool

>>6431596
Actually I don't. I literally just can't fucking stand you for some reason. You are the mosquito of this board, or even a housefly. Everyone's at the party and eating cake and you fly your big black bloated body right into the fucking punchbowl and just kick around, never drowning and distributing little granules of shit everywhere. You manage to fly away and we make new punch but just a little while later you splash right back in, shitting everything up again.

>>6431704

Really obnoxious hyperbole.

>>6431527
What bothers me about some people on /lit/ is that they actively try to find reasons to get angry or upset

>>6431708
Get the fuck out of the punch.

>>6431526
here's something that won't help:
https://youtu.be/SklMVcmuFYo?t=6m28s

>>6431708
Get the fuck out of the punch.

>>6431508
I must be a pleb, I didn't see the blind rage the author had for those curtains to curse at them like that.

>>6431526
>>6431514
>>6431765
Annie is absolutely fantastic. Florence etal. -- she's wife material, essentially. God, to have such a charming and talented being...

>>6431508
The trick lies in entertaining several possibilities at the same time, be they exclusive or non.

>>6431617
The message conveyed by something is separate from and different to the thing itself.

Wow, I didn't know there were so many people who knew fuck all about literature on this board.

You're not wrong if you reject deeper meaning in, say, a curtain. Your teacher isn't wrong when he or she DOES read this into it, as long as it's a sound interpretation/close reading that holds up. Rejecting ALL deeper meanings would be retarded though, especially with the ridiculous argument of going with 'what the author meant'. Besides it being impossible for you to know what the author meant, it is not relevant at all. Meaning in a text isn't produced by the author, meaning is produced by the reader, and there is, atleast in modern literary theory, no stable meaning in a text. Ofcourse all of this is always subject to change with intellectual and scholarly shifts in thinking, but 'what the author meant' is in no school of LITERARY criticism remotely interesting or relevant. (If you were to use a text to look historical or cultural context, it might be a factor.)

>>6431508
Despite the fact that the phrase 'what author meant' is flawed from the outset, the point is essentially correct: why the fuck should blue signify depression outside of the western colloquialism of 'blue' meaning melancholic? A tiny percentage of the world's population would understand that blue represents depression

>>6433316
>'what the author meant' is in no school of LITERARY criticism remotely interesting or relevant.
of course it is, insofar as the author is a product of their own context and therefore imbues the text with his own reading of it, despite being its creator. 'what the author meant' is another way of saying 'how the author read his own work'

>>6431583
well duh anon. most of this board should've learned that by high school.

Why would the author bother with a description of curtains if they don't mean anything?

>>6434334
Illustration.

>>6434334
>muh cechov's gun

>>6434334
the curtains absolutely must go off

>>6434242
roland barthes is a retard and I spent three days proving this to /lit/ in 2012, look it up.

>>6434834
b-but blue is fabulous

>>6434334
>>6434373
Illustration for what? To make you feel in that room and believe this room exist? And how does it feel to be in this room? Would it be different if the curtains were red or if there were no curtains?

When you say illustration it seems that you think that what is illustrated is somehow taken for granted, unimportant or that it has no effect on how we read a story. It doesn't matter how much thought the author gave to it, because, back to the point, what the author meant was never an issue. Just that every detail of the work, be it illustrative, or effects of prose and so on conspire to create the meaning that we took from this work. The depression comes first to the reader and is later identified in the curtains (or in whatever else).

>>6434863
>I spent three days proving this to /lit/ in 2012, look it up.

It's pretty arrogant to think you've definitively "proven" anything and that anyone at all should go comb the archives for your contributions.

I don't recall any headlines about some anonymo on 4chan proving "barthes is a retard".

>>6434899
>pretty arrogant
oh no, you've releaved my horrible character to me, shattering my self-image, because I totally wasn't aware of being arrogant! I have explained why one particular rather small detail in one of his texts is wrong, it was autistastic.

>>6434923
Don't lose sight of what's important: nobody's combing the archive for your piddle.

>>6433316
>but 'what the author meant' is in no school of LITERARY criticism remotely interesting or relevant.
Which just tells us how completely divorced from common concern all our schools of literary criticism are.

Still, there are other ways to think about what we mean when we say "what the author meant". If we posit some n, which is the quality of a sentence which tells us whether it is probably symbolic, we can assume that intent tends to produce that quality. A sentence like "John woke up feeling nauseated" has a tendency to not make us think about whether his waking up is a metaphor or a microcosm or allegorical or whatever. It has something inherent in it that tells us not to read too deeply into it.

The reason that this matters is that we don't read texts just for the sake of mental masturbation. We intend to get something out of it. The thing that makes texts matter is that they are not accidents, they are really products of human minds. Getting into the ideas and the life of the author behind the work is one of the supreme rewards of reading.

It seems to me the worst kind of narcissism to have these texts which finally "construct a bridge across that abyss of human loneliness" (to quote the meme man), where each man is no longer locked in his own tower, where we can see into the human heart--and then to say "but it isn't the human being that matters." When so many novels and poems are straining to show us the importance of brotherhood with the kind, we read them and think "what a lovely object is this book"--this attitude I will never accept, regardless of how philosophically sound it seems. Philosophy and literature have never been married successfully--from the outset, they've been enemies, and they still are. I'll keep my humanity and my interest in the author and his intent, and you can all fuck off.

>>6434941
>Don't lose sight of what's important: nobody's combing the archive for your piddle.
OH NO! NOT ANOTHER BLOW TO MY WORLDVIEW!
I totally thought you were ACTUALLY going to look it up... i'm devastated!

>>6431547
No, there are posts on the board that say that what the author meant matters.

There is no poster.

psst...your teacher probably didn't believe it either but it was on the syllabus and it's their job to help everyone pass the exam

>>6434990
What's it like being a teacher?

>>6434999
Awesome, I work 6 hours a day and get 14 weeks holiday a year

>>6434990
This frightens me to no end because I plan on becoming a teacher

but I don't want to teach kids to pass tests, I want to teach them to enjoy learning

>>6435106
But that's not what school is for.

>>6435117

>>6435121
Maybe there's some other way you can teach stuff without being in the school system. Don't give up!

A better on is that there are actually people who think

>What the author wrote: The curtains were green.
>What the author meant (As stated in a later essay): The curtains were blue
>What the reader is supposed to understand: The curtains were blue

When will plebs get that the author is dead?

>>6435155
i read the dead author essay, i think it confirms the importance of authorial intent. after all, the author is dead.

>>6431537
As if graduates posting on here is any less embarrassing

>>6435155
Dead of the author is a tool among others, it just means that you shouldn't take the authors opinion as a final word, something that a ton of idiots do.
Implying that you can't take information from other works, context and declarations of the author is just hurting your own interpretation.

>>6435175
You're saying that authorial intent is the same as the argumentation the text have. That's pretty dumb, friend.

>>6435232
>You're saying
i'm being pointlessly inflammatory because mocking groupthink is my hobby
also it doesn't matter what i say, i'm dead

>>6434888
>And how does it feel to be in this room? Would it be different if the curtains were red or if there were no curtains?
Does this actually matter or not? It is a simple fact that the curtains are blue.You can take any bullshit you want out of it but your feeling don't necessarily have anything to do with the curtains being blue. You and the character will be depressed whatever the color the curtains are. You can be depressed on a sunny day. It has nothing to do with the curtains, the weather or anything; that is all on you, your mental state, and your projecting feelings on things.

>>6435274
But that's the exact point, silly, since you're dead it doesn't matter why you said something but what you said.
In other words, when you are being retarded on purpose the joke isn't on them.

>>6435370
Oh shut it, zombie.

>>6435377

>>6431618
fun latin fact!

Plebs is pronounced with a p rather than a b contrary to popular belief!

if the author is some chump authorial intent doesn't matter, if he's an exceptional individual his intention is of interest regardless of its actual impact on the text

>>6435530
pleb
i pronounced the b
therefore pleb is pronounced with a b

>>6435318
It matters when it does. That's precisely my point that the sentiment, the thought, the impression comes first and analysis comes later. The teacher won't convince you in becoming sad by pointing out to the curtains, but both of you can explain where the sadness comes from if it's there in the text.

Also, don't forget the example is shit and everyone is using it just because. The curtains being blue can be a detail or it can be extremely important to the story, but of course the choice of the curtains as example is there to incline the argument towards thinking its unimportant. To say one will or will not be depressed because of the curtains is to take the example as a real one. It's not up to us in this point to claim that it matters or that it doesn't, but if your attention is drawn to the curtains in a particular story, then it definitely does.

On top of that you talk of "projecting feelings" as if it was a bad thing, but when you read that's exactly what you do and precisely what you're there to analyze and talk about. The meaning is not within the hypothetical intentions of the writer, but in the associations that emerge from your reading of the text. "The curtains were fucking blue" of OPs image is just as much as a projection as the teacher's interpretation. The point was never about guessing what the author meant.

>>6435567
thats fine. Its just a fun fact and a short lesson on latin pronunciation.

>>6434899
roflmao hilarious post anon

>>6435117
I know, I know--school is supposed to just make them well-rounded, right? Give them the most basic set of knowledge to get through life with? I do think that's a noble goal. But I think that will be more fully realized if they are taught how to love learning for its own sake; to feel that life is more fully lived when you can get outside of the vulgar and vulgarizing patterns of your own mind by suffusing your day-to-day existence with all the brilliant and variegated works of art and truths of history and the sciences which are the rightful inheritance of all humankind.

Passing a test means so little. Maybe schools hire teachers so kids can pass tests. But twelve years of syllabus can't compare with what you can give a kid by teaching them the right attitude toward knowledge and culture--that it's not about being smart, or being successful, but about being really alive.

>>6437303
Regardless of authorial intent, a good interpretation is salient and coherent. It should be something that is continuously represented throughout the work, not something that is vaguely noticeable and doesn't serve to enhance knowledge of the text & language. The latter point is something modern academia fails at in favor of making careers out of nonsense that helps no one.