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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1215538" data-attributes="member: 812">It all starts like this...You are going to have to explain how reading an author's subjective view of their own thought processes provides an objective way to decide anything about their work.To my thinking, subjective statements cannot provide objective information about ANYTHING. That, to me, is simply part of the definition of "subjective". I cannot accept your statement here without an explanation of the logic behind it.My position is based on the lack of objective information about a work. I believe (as does most of the critical community) that the only objective source in analysis is the work itself. I'll develop this idea in more detail below. Obviously, if you can prove there are other sources of objective information, my position has no ground to stand on. But so far, you have been unable to prove that.Deride? They take? I think you are misunderstanding the basic point of critical analysis. I don't investigate possible interpretations of literary works in order to either deride them or to make assumptions about the author. I investigate them in order to learn more about the world and myself.I think I can be forgiven for assuming you don't know anything about critical analysis, so I thought to provide you with the basics in an effort to show you why authorial intent is not required to assess interpretations. This is basic, first-year sort of stuff. I'm not offering some crazy idea on criticism, here. These are the basics you need to know if you want to set about investigating artistic works.My hope was that by offering a coherent system of analysis you would see that knowledge about the author's intent is not required.There's the work itself.The ONLY objective fact in critical analysis is the work itself. What the author thinks he said or claims to say is subjective. What anybody else thinks or says is subjective. All we have is the work. All we need is the work. Historical context is interesting, and may provide fruitful avenues of exploration, but we don't need it. Biographical information is interesting likewise, but we don't need it. Certainly it's possible to learn a great deal from works about which we know relatively little -- there's no clear knowledge about Homer, and yet there seems to be a great deal to say about The Iliad. Is that discussion fruitless because it lacks any authorial credibility? Of course not.Ergo, we don't need to pay the slightest attention to anything author says. If we don't want. We probably should, because we'll have new and maybe more interesting ideas, but judging an interpretation according to how closely it aligns with a given statement of the artist's serves no intellectual purpose.You seem to think that suggesting that a work contains certain ideas is equivalent to saying that the author possesses the same idea.Rejection of authorial intent works both ways, though. If you reject intent as an objective source of information on the work, then of course the work ceases to be an objective source of information on the author's intent.Does that ease your outrage? So when somebody creates an interpretation of a work, that is not equivalent to them creating an interpretation of the artist. And any effort to "prove" that an author must hold a certain idea because their work does fails.Just as an accuracy point, Professor Tolkien did not write Gawain and the Green Knight. He was one of two editors (the other being Eric Gordon) of the primary published edition. It's a tremendous work and well worth the effort it takes to read it in the original Middle English.What exactly is the position you think you're attacking here? I never said anything remotely like this.OF COURSE he's capable of doing this. You're quite right. In fact, this is exactly what he did. I have never said that LotR is a set of instructions on how to live or a statement on the rightness of any particular social structure. But it DOES reflect the Professor's point of view on the world. It does contain ideas about how people relate to each other, how evil affects human life, and what the price is of fighting against it. It's full of ideas like this. And there are almost certainly ideas about class structure in this book -- indeed, it would be bizarre if there were not. Many of these ideas Professor Tolkien will have used intentionally. Many MORE of these ideas he will have used unconsciously, simply incorporating them into the work as part of his world-view. It's more than possible that ideas are present in the work that he did not intend to include. It's even possible that the work presents ideas he would not, if he thought about them consciously, agree with.Certainly I have done things without being aware at the time that I was manifesting ideas (say, about violence or compassion) that I disagree with. Sometimes I never realised what my actions were saying until somebody pointed it out to me. I think this is a common failing and certainly one I would think the Professor capable of.At the very least, I would not simply dismiss such a notion out of hand because it might be rude. It is not rude to suggest that an artistic work contains ideas not consciously inserted by the artist. An artistic work is on public display and as such is open to all interpretations that can be made to fit. If you don't want your work interpreted, don't publish it.To say that a given work contains a particular idea about the world is not "forcing a message on an author". It is a statement, an idea, about the work. Nothing more or less than that. It offers us no objective insight into the thought processes of the author, and certainly anyone who claims it does is talking right through their hat.And you can tell them I said so.</blockquote>

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