Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 00:52:32 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Wiggle them hips


Dennis wrote:
>
>>It's all strictly for entertainment value.
>>
>>Which is why I wouldn't mind seeing Hugh wiggle *his* hips via Shockwave
>>or wax poetic on the art of seduction for all of us. Normally you'd have
>>to rent this kind of decadent, fin de siecle stuff from some Tarantino
>>video, but thanks to the magic of e-mail, you can get it for free. Ain't
>>progress wonderful!

And Yoshie opined:

>I don't think the above would be very seductive or entertaining, even if
>it's for free. Hugh's too literal-minded, as you can seen in his subject
>line!

What's literal-minded got to do with hip-wiggling?

Now, Yoshie obviously hadn't read my clarification as to the subject line
when she wrote her comment about literal-minded. Cos whatever you might
call someone who alludes to a poem by Yeats where Pride and Truth do an
allegorical bump and grind to stop the kids from moralizing and start them
on the road to dignity and fulfilment, I don't think "literal-minded" is
really appropriate.

Any literal-mindedness I might display is the result of hard labour and
discipline on my part -- it's an excellent quality that saves an awful
amount of misunderstanding, and one that Hegel had to a surpassing extent.
No philosopher ever wrote using such simple terms as he did. What he did
with them was very complex at times, but I think most of the problems
people have understanding him are due to not reading him in a sufficiently
elemental and down-to-earth way.

Cut me loose and I'll associate my way through time and space more than
most. And let the irony flail. But irony depends on shared understandings,
and that's something that is absent from most classrooms and these lists.

When I was about to take exams my supervisor always advised me *not* to use
my imagination.

I asked:

>>Seductive for who? In what ways seductive? And why?

and Yoshie answered:

>Seductive for potential foot soldiers for the revolution, obviously.

But  then went on to say what wasn't seductive, instead of what would be
seductive. So once again: In what ways seductive?

I wrote:

>>I wish Yoshie wouldn't keep getting the wrong end of my stick.

and Yoshie retorted:

>I wish you studied rhetoric in order to improve your agit-prop.

Well, concrete advice is always welcome. My motto in rhetoric so far has
always been: Take care of the sense, and the sounds take care of
themselves. If you don't like the sense of it, you won't like what I write.
When I talk to the kids about rules of writing I always tell 'em rule
number one is: Know what you want to say! (Number two is: So go ahead and
say it!)

>It's how you come across that counts.

Good presentation helps, but the medium is not the message. And the best
presentation aids are real commitment and real confidence (Yoshie
emphasizes the negative effect of a lack of confidence in her posting.) And
audiences are made up of very different components, so you'll never come
across the same way to all listeners. It's the potential real listeners
that matter.


>The author is dead as soon as the text is out.

Authors are dead when they die. Till then they can slug it out with the
best of 'em as to what they meant by a certain text.

In one way Yoshie is stating a truism (what Carrol would call a tautology
if I had written it) -- a text is an artefact, congealed labour, and once
written it goes out into the world to seek its fortune (habent sua fata
libelli). But it doesn't have legs of its own. Someone's got to shove it
under someone else's nose. And for a book to be in a position to be shoved
under your nose, a whole cultural infrastructure is needed.

And this infrastructure together with the defence by the author of the
book's intentions are powerful factors affecting the reception of a book.

The author is definitely a part of the context of a text. It matters that
Sappho and  George Eliot were women, and that Wilde was gay.

When it comes to teaching, I'd always use New Criticism as an excellent way
to introduce students to close readings, and to get away from the idea that
the author is everything -- "good author = good text, regardless" (-- I
think I've told my favourite story about Swedish universities before -- my
mate and me were studying English novels and didn't have time to read 'em
all, so we filled in each other on the one's we hadn't read, and both got
better marks on the one's we hadn't read than the ones we had read!) But
once you can deal with texts on their own merits, the context adds
dimensions that can give them a lot more concrete impact.

The author's relationship with a text can be like the relationship of a
parent with a child, autonomous but interdependent.

Cheers,

Hugh





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