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Message: <blockquote data-quote="el-remmen" data-source="post: 4500645" data-attributes="member: 11">English class is right. . . <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  I mean, I am looking at all this from the point of view of literary theory and criticism. . .  And I could point you to wikipedia's page on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_fallacy" target="_blank">the Intentional Fallacy</a> (I guess I just did), but really it talks about it in context of New Criticism (which is really old criticism, but it was relatively new when it was dubbed as such and the name stuck), which tells us that everything we need to know about a literary work can be found in the work itself and not outside of it, but I am not a proponent of New Criticism, as I think certain contexts or lens (such as class, gender, race, historical context) can help round out the view of a work.Anyway, the most direct way I can explain how an author's view is not "authoritative" is by simply asking this question: Is an author's view of his or her work always unchanging, static. . .?  I think it is safe to say (and anyone who has seriously written for pleasure or profit would likely agree) that this is often not the case. Heck in some cases, it is not only the author's opinion on their own work that changes (in terms of quality) but their understanding of the reasons and methods they used in its creation!  And if that is the case, how can such authorial view be privileged over anyone else with a familiarity with the work, such as that gained from careful and repeated critical study?  Just because an author may not have noticed patterns, tropes, themes, implications of their work does not mean they are not there and that they don't mean something in the context of that work.Jeez. . . the thing's I'll do to procrastinate when I should be working on my master's thesis. . . <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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