Ah, you brought it up! The bane of our decade, of logic and common sense: "I am entitled to my subjective opinion!" You know, as simplistic and reductive as that image is, I saw a pretty good response to it online, one that is different from yours. One that fits literature surprisingly well. The guy said "you may not know if that's a 9 or a 6, and you can argue all day about your subjective opinion, but the truth is that there is someone who drew that number and who knows if it's a 9 or a 6. Just ask him". But we don't want to acknowledge that there is someone who has the answer. A collective "we", that is. Some of us do accept authorial intent and insight.

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

And that can be useful, but the counter to that is, 'Yes, but while that person may have intended it to be a 6 (or a 9) they did not include sufficient information for that to be definitive. If they had included an indicator as to the base of the number, then the ambiguity would not arise.' Both readers and authors can make mistakes. 😁

@claudiaiovanovici7569

Ай бұрын

@@ACriticalDragon I agree with this argument only partially. When a toddler draws something, it may have no resemblance to the item he wants to draw, but he does know what he meant to draw (just ask me and my father when I was 6 and was asked to draw a banana and it turned out something more like a melon. To this day he cries about the evil of communist times, when kids here never saw bananas and how his poor little baby girl didn't even know how a banana looks like. Telling him that I did know how it looks like because I had seen it in Tom and Jerry and that my drawing skills were so bad that it resembled a full circle is something he just didn't want to hear because he liked his victim badge, the poor, helpless father who suffers in witnessing his child's suffering). In likewise manner, any artist knows what he or she meant to create. Whether they were good enough to succeed in their intention is whole other debate (I clearly sucked at it and I might not be much better even now 😂). But they do know if that number was meant as a 9 or a 6 and they can definitely rule out on at least that much. Clearly, my father disregarded authorial intent in favor of his objective take :))))

@Edog1337

Ай бұрын

@@claudiaiovanovici7569 Sometimes the creator/author intends for a 6 (or 9), and did not convey it well enough so that it is actually an 11. To a large percentage of intended readers. Authorial intent certainly is valid, but so is authorial error, authorial lack of structure/pacing/prose skill or many other items which can blur their actual intent. I fell like we are giving the benefit of the doubt to the author in these conversations. Unless the Authorial Intent is bludgeoned over your head a la RF Kuang, or skillfully woven and hidden amongst nuance such as Erikson (but actually there if you do the homework), it can often be lost.

@JPT-kg8fm

Ай бұрын

But the person who created the image wanted us to not be sure which it was, and therefore chose it because it could be either.

@claudiaiovanovici7569

Ай бұрын

@@Edog1337 All of which are valid points. The author may succeed or may fail in properly delivering their intent. However, if there is anyone in this world who knows what that intent was to begin with, it's the author, the person who drew the 9, regardless whether people see it as a 6, a 3, or an 11. A badly drawn 9, to the point that it can be interpreted as anything, is still a 9. And that's the point.

Just noted the 'invalid readings' and thought that's just Philip being his librocubicularist self. 🤣

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

It is just what he does after a tough tennis match and his knees are sore.

@Paul_van_Doleweerd

Ай бұрын

@@ACriticalDragon It's probably how he chooses his opponents as well. 😁

Word for the day - eisegesis. There are also some tricksy authors who like to leave things vague with, possibly, hidden symbolism. The meme could also be referring to the zodiac symbol for cancer. Or maybe I just read one too many Dan Brown books, which would have been The Last Symbol.

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

I leave the biblical scholarship up to Raf Blutaxt.

Excellent video. I’ve had to think more deeply on this topic recently since starting my first classic (The Divine Comedy). I’ve picked up the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation and although it’s fun to read the text multiple times until I interpret a meaning that makes the most sense to me, I wouldn’t begin to formally review it until I look more into many other important aspects of the literature, including intent.

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

We all have to find our own threshold or balance point. We cannot have perfect information, and therefore, at some point, we draw the line. As to works in translation, it can be really interesting to compare/contrast key passages from different translations. Sometimes it can even be revelatory.

This and a related topic have been something of a sore subject with me - particularly in this last week, so nice timing for the video. Thank you for making this, AP. It was mildly cathartic to listen to :D

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

I am very sorry to hear that this has been a sore subject. I hope that I didn't make matters worse.

@ReadingByTheRainyMountain

Ай бұрын

@@ACriticalDragon No you didn't - your video helped :)

Sorry about the video snafu this morning.

There was a meme from a few years ago that the internet would use to essentially make fun of people's tastes: Man who has only seen the animated movie Boss Baby: "I'm getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this new movie." But if we imagine that hypothetical man as a genuine person, I kind of unironically believe it's a great example of how subjectivity vs. objectivity works haha

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

Harlan Ellison is attributed with saying "You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion." He was an interesting character.

@Paul_van_Doleweerd

Ай бұрын

​@@ACriticalDragonOne of the best short story writers of all time. Sadly that's a bit of a lost art.

i would say someone can be incorrect, i think its clear that in life there is objectivity, nature, state, and the innate, with books peoples opinion, as with many things, can sometimes just simply be not fair or just or appropriate or apt to the situation, aspect, factor, component they are trying to discuss or identity

I have read books that said on the cover, "The greatest book of (insert year here). And it certainly wasn't, in my opinion. We both read the book but one of us was certainly wrong. As a writer, I often misread what I have written. I get confused about what I have written in the past, what I want to say, and what is actually on the page. If I can misread my own writing, a reader can do the same. They may confuse what they have read in the past, what they wish the story to be, and what is on the page.

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

In matters of taste and preference, the customer is always right... but the customer can be very wrong in a whole host of other areas. If it said on the cover 'This is the best book I have read in X year", I don't think any of us would argue that they are wrong... that would be a personal preference and judgement. But 'This is the best book of X Year" is a claim that requires substantial evidence. 😁😁

I love the Michael Clark Duncan daredevil reference🤣

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

He was a great Kingpin.

I'm not a fan of the postmodern idea that all interpretations of a work are equally valid. authorial intent clearly is a thing and matters and it is their story. You can misinterpret it with your own biases but your misinterpretaion does NOT cancel their intent. (I'm not criticizing stuff like feminist retelling of misogynistic stories by male authors. That can be good if done well.)

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

That aspect of postmodernist deconstruction of meaning is often subjected to reductio ad absurdum and it is often removed from the context in which it is being discussed, stripped of meaning and context, and reduced to 'mere opinion = truth and meaning". In effect, turning a really complex investigation of what meaning is and how it is constructed into a bumper sticker of 'Me think, therefore me right'. We can recognise that someone has responded to a text, but that response is not necessarily a fair or even repeatable interpretation. Especially if misreading and misunderstanding are considered possible.

@Paul_van_Doleweerd

Ай бұрын

​@@ACriticalDragoncogito ergo sum recte, lol.

@Iridescence93

Ай бұрын

@@ACriticalDragon Context is important I agree with you. There are interesting discussions to have about how the meaning we take from stories changes over time and across cultures I think you can do that without completely disregarding the intent of the author.

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

How meaning can shift and be reinterpreted in different cultures and time periods is absolutely fascinating. I love that stuff, and it is why consideration of personal response is so incredibly important, but when people take it to the point of 'this is what I say, therefore this is a valid way to see it' I get a bit of a twinge. 😂😂😂 Meaning is definitely not 'fixed' categorically for all time, but there will still be a range of meanings supported by the text.

Great video! (assuming nothing much has changed from the previous upload) I'm currently partway through Percival Everett's Erasure, in which the chasm between reader response and the authorial intent is carved by the (in-book) audience's inability to distinguish parody from authentic portrayal. It brings to mind Poe's law -- parodic or sarcastic expression of sufficiently extreme views are indistinguishable from the views themselves, without outside knowledge of the author. It seems possible for a reader's misreading of the parody as authentic to be fully supported by the text on the page, but still feel clearly "wrong" .

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

The misreading of parody or satire is really common. Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' contains lots of 'clues' that it is satire, but many modern readers don't pick up on them, and therefore do a straight reading and ignore tone, style, and other elements of writing. So the text ends up being misinterpreted. This video makes many the same points as the earlier one, but I think this simplifies the positions slightly and has a image to illustrate perspective. If people wanted a more nuanced explanation I can always do another one at a later date going into the different literary theories and about the privileging of information.

@Paul_van_Doleweerd

Ай бұрын

​@@ACriticalDragonThe idea of someone reading that as an essay is mind boggling!

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

@@Paul_van_Doleweerd My friend used to teach it in a history of Ireland class and every time had to explain to several students that it was Satire and not meant to be taken literally.

@Paul_van_Doleweerd

Ай бұрын

@@ACriticalDragon Perhaps the tone of that particular work is too straightforward for the inexperienced reader. But seriously, you have to feed the babies, so it would make more sense to just eat the baby food and cut out the middle man as it were...

I suspect I misread Bank's Use of Weapons on my reread, since the twist at the end did not work for me. Yet Ibwas told by another reader it was quite central to the book's theme.

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

It has been a long time since I read it, but I remember it being one of my favourite Culture novels.

I read all sorts of stuff and have no clue what the right interpretation is other than it isn't the one im thinking.

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

There isn't 'THE' right interpretation, but there may be a range of valid and supportable interpretations.

@DanExploresBooks

Ай бұрын

@@ACriticalDragon Not sure how to interpret this. So I shall take offense.

@ACriticalDragon

Ай бұрын

That is the Way of the Internet.