I believe authority in the sense of knowing what the meaning of a text is should be passed throw two rules of thumb 1. Is the work of the author understood by the public and 2. Are both the majority of public and the author in agreement on the meaning. I’ve come to this […]
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suspect of authority
The Working Question on page fifteen in relation to authority of meaning rose many questions to mind. The question asks who subsequently determines the meaning behind any piece of written work: the reader or the writer? In this particular example, a close friend has written a poem about their grandmother’s funeral and I’ve perceived the […]
It feels like aesthetics philosophy all over again.
At first, I found the assigned readings for today frustrating- turned existential crisis inducing (at best). Let me explain: I saw three chapters all leading up to the resounding ‘well anything can mean anything’ because everything is ‘subjective’. Sure the chapters dance around it but it all seems centric to a broad notion of: why do we […]
Working Question–Advertisements
I haven’t been able to decide what to write about, so I just picked one of the “Working Questions.” There’s one at the end of the Subjectivity chapter that asks something like: Most of us would agree that advertisements have relatively little effect on our decisions, so why do advertisers advertise? This reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s […]
Self, Subject, and Truth
Before I started delving into the readings assigned for this blog post, I took a glance at the reading schedule (formally known as “2016 Schedule” on the ENGL 299 website) and had a feeling that I was going to be writing about the chapter entitled “Subjectivity”. Well, here I am, writing about subjectivity. We […]
Subjectivity of Self
Within the chapter Subjectivity in the Theory Toolbox, we receive insight into the definitions of the idea of “self” and the idea of “subject”. Before reading this, I had never put a lot of thought into the the ideas that are presented about how there really is no way a person can be an individual, […]
No, The Author Never Died, and Some Opinons Are In Fact, Wrong
As a preface to my response to our reading, it must be said that I, as a fellow reader and an author, value highly the interpretive power of both roles in literature and study thereof. After all, one of my most favorite philosophers of the Western Hemisphere, Soren Kierkegaard wrote famously, “Truth is subjectivity.” As […]
Which Comes First: The Metaphor or the Metonymy?
The Theory Toolbox asks the important question of how we read: is it, as the book says a dig through the “social meaning to get to the real…essence of the word” or is it the way we take into account other aspects of a work and how we use that work in different ways? Interestingly […]
queer in context
The “Working Question” on page 28-29 in the chapter “Reading” caught my attention. The section states that words like “queer” and “dyke,” which were used as harmful slurs in the 1950s (and for many years surrounding the decade), have since been “reappropriated by the homosexual community itself.” The author questions how these things happen over […]
Reader as Interpreter
The reading for today poses an interesting theory that questions not only the capacity of authorship but more importantly, of the reader. To quote TT quoting Friedrich Nietzche, “facts… do not exist, only interpretations.” While one may blindly assume reading is nothing more than a means of consumption, it is ignorant to assume that anything can be consumed […]