Comment by JumpCrisscross
5 hours ago
> you're asking me to value the thoughts I get from the writing without regard for the thoughts that produced it. This seems dubious, if not actually oxymoronic
The archaeological record is loaded with texts of dubious or unknown authorship. Many of our oldest classical texts fall into this category [1].
That doesn't make them "oxymoronic" to engage with. Just more difficult. From a time when few were writing and fewer of their works survived, this is worth the effort. When a nickel of electricity can produce text, it's not–we need the filter of authorship to decide how much effort we, as humans, should expend in engaging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer#Biography,_identity,_and...
Are you trying to argue that archeological texts weren't written by humans? Because otherwise I don't understand how your comment is related to the parent comment. It has nothing to do with not knowing the identity of the author. It's about the author being a human.
> trying to argue that archeological texts weren't written by humans?
I’m arguing they’re minds of unknowable foreignness to our own. We fill in the gaps because the text per se has meaning. If anything, we give those minds meaning through the text, not the other way around.
We impute “the thoughts that produced” those writings. One can just as easily contemplate the method through which human writing got distilled into a matrix of numbers that produced a particular output in response to a prompt.
(I’ve absolutely read works without a care in the world for the author.)
If anything, difference in mind is a reason to read. I want to know what experiences the other person has had which contribute to their perspective. No less so in areas like technical writing where perspective may be less overt.
In Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" we learn that Menard, the fictional 20th century writer of the eponymous title, immerses himself in the language and culture of 16th century Spain (pre-1602, to be precise), to the point where he writes a chapters of a book which are word-for-word identical parts of Don Quixote.
Yet the literary criticism of Borges's short story points out how the two texts have different messages.
For Cervantes, this is a book for the people, written in the language of the people.
For Menard, this is a book for specialists, who would understand the old Spanish language.
In the 20th century of Bertrand Russell and William James, the philosophical concepts that an educated writer like Menard would know are far different than 16th century Spain, so an expression like "history, the mother of truth" has different meanings.
Since you mention Homer, if I were to write of the wine-dark sea you would know I am referring to Homer. It brings along cultural connections, including its own Wikipedia page.
While when Homer uses it, it doesn't have those connections.
The idea that a text stands alone is a formalist style known as New Criticism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism .
> New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of New England, which focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors, taking this approach under the influence of nineteenth-century German scholarship. The New Critics felt that this approach tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. ...
> It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were "uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature."
Borges's story is a commentary about this debate.
While the linked-to essay in the Chronicle made no mention of the long discussion of the relevant literary theories, seemingly insisting that analytical writing somehow stands outside that debate, by simply ignoring the debate.
One of my favorite New Criticism corollaries is that an author, after a work has been published, is not in a privileged position from which to speak on its meaning. Tolkien qua author is omnipotent. Tolkien qua post-publication commenter is another speaker, albeit a highly knowledgeable one. (Purposely picking an example where the author re-wrote his works after publication, e.g. retconning the Ring into The Hobbit.)
> One of my favorite New Criticism corollaries is that an author, after a work has been published, is not in a privileged position from which to speak on its meaning.
That's a line which was more appropriate in a era before the majority of novels had sequels. Now we read series where the plot extends across multiple books. Events in earlier books set up situations to be resolved in later books.
For a recent controversy in this area, ask Google "Is Dumbledore gay?"
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Which leads to some very strange standardized test questions where the students are supposed to use close reading - a New Criticism approach - to infer the author's intent, when what they are actually supposed to do is infer what the test authors consider to be the author's intent.
https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-writer-who-c...
> Back in 2017, Holbrook wrote an essay for Huffington Post entitled, "I Can't Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems." The writer had discovered that two of her poems were part of the Texas STAAR state assessment tests, and she was a bit startled to discover that she was unable to answer some of the questions.
> One reason was simple inaccuracy. One question asked why the poet had inserted a stanza break in a particular spot-- and then didn't insert a stanza break in the testing materials. But there was a second issue. Holbrook is a performance poet, and she had inserted the break at the point where, in live readings, she pauses. That choice was not one of the choices available on the test.
> In fact, much of Holbrook's issue with the questions was a sort of existential dilemma. Several questions asked, directly or indirectly, for the test taker to judge the author's intentions. The author knew some of her intentions, sort of remembered others, and had others that were layered and complex. But the manufacturers of the test--who had never asked her about any of this--provided only four choices that did not allow her to choose the answer that she knew to be correct.
This leads to questions like: Is the author more or less privileged than the test writers? Are the test writers more or less privileged than the students taking the test? If they are of equal privilege then how can there be a standardized test concerning the author's intent?
Such a rich response, much appreciated.
...I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me? The identity of the author is not germane to my point, only whether there actually is an author, aka an actual mind. You could argue those old texts are worth engaging with exactly because they're our only links to those minds.
> whether there actually is an author, aka an actual mind
The mind is long dead. In true Cartesian form, we assume it existed. But it may not be, as with Homer, a single mind.
One can engage with text on its own. Even find meaning in it. Being unable and refusing to are separate categories.
Ok, but when you're reading Homer or Socrates or the Bible (we're relatively sure it has several different authors), you're still engaging with a communal tradition of fellow readers who, in large part, define what it actually means to understand the text. If you read the Odyssey and decide it was actually about Pokemon, you're misreading it.
> you're still engaging with a communal tradition of fellow readers
Inasmuch as you’re reading translations upon translations, sure. But none of that is necessary.
(One could credibly argue that engaging with an LLM is engaging with, in a sense, its training corpus.)
> If you read the Odyssey and decide it was actually about Pokemon, you're misreading it
If you can stand by your reading based on the text, I say go for it. It doesn’t work in your example. But there are plenty of cases where what was once an against-the-grain interpretation dived into and out of the mainstream.
> Inasmuch as you’re reading translations upon translations, sure. But none of that is necessary.
No, even if you read in the original language. Languages are living, communal things.
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