Comment by JumpCrisscross
5 hours ago
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?"
> a line which was more appropriate in a era before the majority of novels had sequels
Serialisation pre-dates the novel.
There is a legitimate debate around the degree to which an author can amend canon with sequels. Various fandoms reject sequels in literature and film, as is their right. I think the broad consensus tends towards treating sequels as canon, however.
> For a recent controversy in this area, ask Google "Is Dumbledore gay?"
Did Rowling write a sequel with this? I thought it was scrawled into the margin of a screenplay.
I think you have to reject the text of the books to argue Harry Potter is an alien. You don’t necessarily to accept or reject Dumbledore’s sexuality.
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?