Satori wrote:Yay for strawmen! I love analyzing literature, actually. It's great fun if you have something worth analyzing... Hint: NOT FANFICTION.
Because why? What differentiates fanfiction from other written work?
I'll tell you: Nothing!
Dante INTENDED The Divine Comedy to conveny,
But you've stated we can't know author's intent. Way to shoot yourself in the foot!
metahphorically, a whole slew of subtexts and implications. Tenhawk, as far as i can see, just wants to write Badass Xandersue.
Doubleshot Contradiction!
Concession Accepted. You just made a claim about the text of Fanfiction! You're one of us now.
One of Us. One of Us. etc.
Your English Teacher would fail you for turning in a paper that attributes a whole bunch of Subtexts and hidden meanings in a Text wehere the Author isn't trying to convey some pithy profound point.
I once wrote a paper on how
A Nightmare on Elmstreet preyed upon the lingering fears and trauma of the Vietnam War.
Did you repeatedly fail english (well, given how you type), or did you just not have teachers tell you that "As long as you can back up your assertions with the text itself, you're argument can be supported?"
There's a reason why Literature classes use Mark Twain and Charles Dickens instead of Ann M. Martin or K. A. Applegate. Because Applegate and Martin don't have any great literary techniques or hidden metaphors for you to explicate. If you turned in a Paper entiteld "Misogyny in Animorphs", your teacher would not be happy.
I can hear my high-school English 2 teacher say it: "Acutally, I think that would be an interesting paper to try and prove. I don't think it would work, but if you want to try then go ahead."
He was also a crazy liberal who let us watch "The Simpsons" for parrallelism to the current work we were reading.
The reason why those texts are chosen is not only because of their artistic meric, but because of their cultural impact, by the way. Literature reflects and, at it's best, influences culture.
Vehrec covered the next point I was going to make, so I won't repeat it.
PROVE IT. Why doesn't intent matter? Intent damn well MATTERS, as far as I can see.
Because, believe it or not, you can't know it. You can only infer it. Aurguing that "This is what the author means" can never be that strong an arugment. When writing an argumentative esay for literature, you use one thing and one thing only: the text. The text is what matters -- the actual content produced. That is what is there and that is what can be analyzed.
Have you ever actually taken a creative writing class? If you have, they will tell you that people will bring their own experiences and histories to any work their reading and will interpret it differently.
When essays or reviews are written about it, they use the text to support their interpretation of the peice, which may be wholy different from what the author intends.
The Moon is made of green cheese! It has all these pock marks and rents just like my favorite brand of cheese so it must be! It's not like the moon's irregular surface could have been cause by Meteor Impacts or anything!
And you say I use strawmen! HA!
"Evidence" doesn;t prove yoru point unless you have enough of it, and it is consistent. I can show you scars on my hand as evidence that am in fact TEH JESUS and was crucified, but would that demonstrate anything?
So you think the evidence is insufficient? That's exactly how I WANT you to argue. You're using my methodology even while you are decrying it.
Can you be any more hypocritical?
That's precisely the point. The "evidence" you put out doesn't conclusively show Misogyny, given the wide variety off reasons tenhawk may have chosen to write that way.
Okay then, how do YOU interpret the belittling of women through inaction and 'lessening' of their prowesses in order to support and elevate a male character?
I think the basic disagreement boils down to you thinking you can interpet Literature any way you like, while i feel that interpetations too far from the intend of the author are invalid.
You're claiming author's intent when we both apparentlyt agree that you can't know it?
You really are a mass of contradictions.
You are, of course, free to continue explicating all you like. I still call it BS.
Without stating why or suplementing a better interpretation. That's crap skeptisism. "You're wrong because I say so" is no better than "I'm right because I say so".
Please do. I'm interested to see how many continuity errors you found.
We nuke the story shortly after Elan appears, but we STILL manage to find a bunch.
We also rip into Tenhawk repeatedly for putting line breaks in the middle of the SAME FUCKING SCENE.