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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2993 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 28, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Well, I'm of the opinion that the 'intended meaning' of a poem or piece of media is totally worthless and uninteresting. The very best art taps into aesthetics or concepts that are to some extent transcendent of their contingent features. Some authorial context can be illuminating, but that's all it is - an aid to understand the text.

Well, I'm of the opinion that the 'intended meaning' of a poem or piece of media is totally worthless and uninteresting

If that is so, you could very well just entertain yourself with a random word generator like Terry A. Davis, no?

The very best art taps into aesthetics or concepts that are to some extent transcendent

I don't necessarily disagree! Those concepts should in principle be discernible however, and above the "noise floor" of the random associations I'd label "schizo". I don't deny that there might be interesting unconscious features of works, just critiquing the tendency of critics to find signals in random noise.

There's a concept in literature analysis called "death of the author" where they only care about what was written, not whatever the author intended.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor

You could, if the random word generator produced something interesting, but they rarely do. Humans are much better at this.

I suppose that in general I think it uninteresting and futile to figure out what exactly other people think. Shelley is dead, his words remain, and if he meant east but wrote west, west is what's on the page. The greatest authority on what the text means is not the author, but the text itself.

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