Does my reply here make sense?
Jul. 26th, 2005 06:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
I stand by it, but I'm not sure that it didn't suffer from haste....
Not that there isn't any point in listening to what the author says about his or her own work, of course. But... no matter what the author thinks is there or isn't there, people will see all sorts of things. Humans are good at seeing patterns, and shapes, and fitting words into what's already in their heads. I could sit and curse this tendancy, or I can smile and say that we're all better off for a little diversity in our reading experience.
Consider that. You hear a story three times, and each time it's a different story because, although the words haven't changed, you have changed. Isn't that better than hearing a story twenty times, but it's always exactly the same, thought after plodding thought?
Not that there isn't any point in listening to what the author says about his or her own work, of course. But... no matter what the author thinks is there or isn't there, people will see all sorts of things. Humans are good at seeing patterns, and shapes, and fitting words into what's already in their heads. I could sit and curse this tendancy, or I can smile and say that we're all better off for a little diversity in our reading experience.
Consider that. You hear a story three times, and each time it's a different story because, although the words haven't changed, you have changed. Isn't that better than hearing a story twenty times, but it's always exactly the same, thought after plodding thought?
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 10:27 am (UTC)I'd never thought HP fandom would have heated debates about pomo theory! Wow.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 12:02 pm (UTC)Now that I think of it, phenomena such as the growth of online HP fandom, fanfiction of every imaginable guise, HP slash, shipper communities, etc., are quite essentially postmodern. Wow, I never thought of it that way. A deconstructivist approach is the only way I can actually make sense of the chain of events which leads from a children's book about a magical parallel universe leading to a world-wide adults-included fascination leading to something like an LJ community devoted to Hagrid's penis, featuring lurid watersport sex with fantastical animals! Thank you Derrida! Way to stick it to the Author, fandom! lol.
I was browsing the relevant wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism) on pomo to give conuly a simple definition, in case it was the idea and not the contraction she was unfamilar with, and here are some quotes to put "fandom" in a postmodernist context:
According to postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernity is characterized as an "incredulity toward metanarratives", meaning that in the era of postmodern culture, people have rejected the grand, supposedly universal stories and paradigms such as religion, conventional philosophy, capitalism and gender that have defined culture and behavior in the past, and have instead begun to organize their cultural life around a variety of more local and subcultural ideologies, myths and stories.
[...]
Where modernists hoped to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, postmodernism aims to unseat them, to embrace diversity and contradiction. A postmodern approach to art thus rejects the distinction between low and high art forms. It rejects rigid genre boundaries and favors eclecticism, the mixing of ideas and forms. Partly due to this rejection, it promotes parody, irony, and playfulness, commonly referred to as jouissance by postmodern theorists. Unlike modern art, postmodern art does not approach this fragmentation as somehow faulty or undesirable, but rather celebrates it. As the gravity of the search for underlying truth is relieved, it is replaced with 'play'.
Hmmmm.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 10:27 am (UTC)I'd never thought HP fandom would have heated debates about pomo theory! Wow.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 12:02 pm (UTC)Now that I think of it, phenomena such as the growth of online HP fandom, fanfiction of every imaginable guise, HP slash, shipper communities, etc., are quite essentially postmodern. Wow, I never thought of it that way. A deconstructivist approach is the only way I can actually make sense of the chain of events which leads from a children's book about a magical parallel universe leading to a world-wide adults-included fascination leading to something like an LJ community devoted to Hagrid's penis, featuring lurid watersport sex with fantastical animals! Thank you Derrida! Way to stick it to the Author, fandom! lol.
I was browsing the relevant wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism) on pomo to give conuly a simple definition, in case it was the idea and not the contraction she was unfamilar with, and here are some quotes to put "fandom" in a postmodernist context:
According to postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernity is characterized as an "incredulity toward metanarratives", meaning that in the era of postmodern culture, people have rejected the grand, supposedly universal stories and paradigms such as religion, conventional philosophy, capitalism and gender that have defined culture and behavior in the past, and have instead begun to organize their cultural life around a variety of more local and subcultural ideologies, myths and stories.
[...]
Where modernists hoped to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, postmodernism aims to unseat them, to embrace diversity and contradiction. A postmodern approach to art thus rejects the distinction between low and high art forms. It rejects rigid genre boundaries and favors eclecticism, the mixing of ideas and forms. Partly due to this rejection, it promotes parody, irony, and playfulness, commonly referred to as jouissance by postmodern theorists. Unlike modern art, postmodern art does not approach this fragmentation as somehow faulty or undesirable, but rather celebrates it. As the gravity of the search for underlying truth is relieved, it is replaced with 'play'.
Hmmmm.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 09:38 pm (UTC)