For awhile now I’ve been meaning to write about Jeff Goldstein’s dustup with Thersites.
The whole thing started with Jeff’s online publication of an academic paper he wrote. Apparently Thersites is a professor, and he takes offense to Jeff’s insistence on the intention of the author being privileged when interpreting the author’s work. The post series (on Jeff’s site) is here, here, here, here, here, and here. I’m pretty much in agreement with intentionalism as the only coherent way to read a text. Simultaneously, I don’t find intentionalism terribly fulfilling as an interpretive philosophy — It’s a starting point, not an ending point.
This is probably not terribly interesting or engaging unless you’ve been following this issue yourself. Unfortunately I can’t really do justice to the subject matter in short, so it boils down to turning this into a drama between talking heads. The shocking climax of this sordid tale is that things eventually ballooned into Thersites deleting his blog. It’s not often that you see an opponent in an intellectual debate so thoroughly destroyed that he completely abandons his online persona and blog.
Some more thoughts of mine below the fold…
Continue reading ‘Intentionalist Wars’
Or, when you realize that things you may like originate from morally bankrupt people.
I was browsing the internets today as I am wont to do, when, by chance, I happened to stumble upon the wikipedia article for The Legend of Earthsea, a subpar Sci-Fi miniseries. Perhaps subpar is not the correct word to describe it — It was on par for Sci-Fi miniseries, which is to say it was cheesy, uninspiring, and generally bad. It was better than some of the other programming on Sci-Fi, but much worse than any episode of Battlestar Galactica.
Down at the bottom of the page you’ll notice an intriguing link: The whitewashing of Earthsea. Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I read the first Earthsea book about a decade ago, so my memory of it is not the clearest, to say the least. I have not read beyond that book. I took a look at the link.
Reading LeGuin’s essay was a real eye-opener for me. While I can sympathize with her outrage over changing the story’s timeline, characters, plot points, LeGuin apparently is most concerned with the decision to depict the main character as white. I find the superficiality of her objections astounding and, not even astounding but repulsive. The vacuousness of her stance on this issue belies a much deeper intellectual corruption. Upon further exploration I found even further disgusting, anachronistic views from LeGuin, such as her commentary that it was only in her fourth book that she grew courageous enough to throw off the shackles of male perspective.
At least now I know never to take anything she has written or said seriously ever again.
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