NP Readership (was ...

[jbor]

owen wrote:

> the text exists without you.

I'll stop this one right here and quibble about that little definite article
there, which I think might make all the difference.

Not sure either about a literature professor of any stripe asserting that
beowulf was a marxist and feminist text. Offering a Marxist or feminist
reading or critique, perhaps, but ...?! A joke, surely?

Also, there's a degree of, perhaps deliberate, ambiguity in that Gaddis
quote. He says that "writing" is "all about what happens between the reader
and the page". That's a paradox for sure, if not entirely a postmodernist
pov. And in the final comment about the reader "helping to construct the
fiction that I am giving him [sic]" he seems to be having fifty cents each
way. Is the reader constructing the fiction, or is Gaddis? Construction vs
gift is a nice analogy for the reader/writer dichotomy or duality. However,
I'm not sure that this process of "collaboration" - an idealisation, surely
- is any real guarantee of the singularity of "the" text.

I think one thing which the enemies of post-structuralism and postmodernism
always resort to is the old reductio ad absurdum argument that it equals
absolute relativism. I doubt that you'll actually find any postmodernist who
advocates absolute relativism; and I think it's equally the case that any
theoretical construct pushed to its logical limit will have a tendency to
implode on itself. I guess this is one reason why postmodernism asserts a
resistance to absolutes, those grand metanarratives, even as it is conscious
of writing itself (off) as one. By the way, another Gaddis quotable quote is
about having "the courage to live without absolutes."

Interesting comments. Specific criticism of philosophical bloopers
gratefully-received.

best (and welcome)


> i don't mean that the atoms that comprise the book continue to exist when you
> have left it; i mean that the ideas and characters and plot (or lack thereof)
> continue without your presence.  sure, when you read the book you bring to it
> your own past and you interpret the book in a semi-esoteric way.  this is a
> valid insight presented by postmodern thought.  however when the idea is
> pushed it becomes absurd: like some bizarre observer created quantum
> metaphysical system.
> 
> if we assume that the text does not exist without you then literature becomes
> a solipsistic endeavor.  the point of literature, i would venture, is
> community.  if the text does not exist without you, then this community seems
> logically impossible - if everybody's reading is the correct reading then i,
> as a writer, will give up writing because my part of the whole affair is
> worthless.
> 
> i find it philosophically lazy to assume that any reading of a text is just as
> good as another reading.  everybody's reading is *valid*, but that does not
> mean that there is equality in validity.  the point of writing, as far as i
> can determine, is to communicate *something* - whether this is a philosophical
> idea, a feeling, the belief that nothing is communicable, the point is
> communication.
> 
> robert brandom has made steps beyond the linguistic solipsism of extreme
> postmodernism in _Making it Explicit_ and _Articulating Reasons_ articulates
> what he calls inferentialism.  that is, language (and literature, i would
> argue) works because, though we all have different and individual pools of
> knowledge from which to draw, we are able to draw on knowledge common to most
> or all of us.  such is literature: literature works because we are presented
> with a text written within this field of assumed common knowledge - from this
> we each bring our own strengths and weakenesses in terms of the knowledge pool
> that the author used in the creation of the novel.  each reading is a valid
> exegesis, but those with a better foundation in the knowledge pool of the
> author are able to articulate a more refined and robust reading than someone
> unfamiliar with the knowledge.
> 
> yes, the text exists without you - there are thousands of other people
> engaging with the text; to think that the text exists in the world only when
> you read it is solipsism and rejection of community and commonality.  i feel
> this is inherently egocentric and selfish view of literature and the world,
> not to mention a refusal of engagement with the human community.
> 
> 
> 
>> You seem rather choosy about what to include your pluralism.
> 
> pluralism is intrinsically choosy.  pluralism allows for various
> interpretations, it does not say you have to endorse all of them - that would
> be subjectivism.  isaiah berlin offers throughout his oeuvre articulations on
> pluralist thought - his essay "Two Conceptions of Liberty" is particularly
> instructive.  when we look at the values and rights that we hold to be ends in
> themselves (liberty, justice, life, etc.) we find that these
> ends-in-themselves infringe on each other.  a society with absolute justice
> would make absolute liberty an impossibility.  what pluralism does is
> recognize the many options possible for creating a society with these
> ends-in-themselves - it doesn't say that all are equal.  in fact, we have to
> choose one of these possibilities while at the same time realizing that it is
> only one possibility and may turn out to be lesser than another.
> 
> sorry for the rant.  the literary analysis on the list is generally pretty
> good, but christ guys, the philosophy is really sloppy...
>