semiotics

[Ghetta Life]

Yust telling you, as a freind, posting a message like this (endless & 
formless) just begs one to delete it before reading..

Ghetta

>From: John Doe <tristero69 at yahoo.com>
>
>So, by YOUR reasoning, the content of your e-mail
>response to me is: " Scupza was like oil, painted
>upwards of my vestibular clamshell,and freezone pizza
>rubric deflated tire over the right stance; pollywogs
>twiddle in their polian glee, but sinks my heart as
>waterfalls - the loon that laughs, the babe that
>bawls, is skittering under sticky-note pads..."
>etc......your argument ignores the obvious; sure,
>readers will bring their own takes on certain terms,
>which,due to their ambuguity, leave certain meanings
>"open"...but, and your own statements betray it, there
>is also the intended meaning; how would ANY
>communication occur, if everyone saw EVERY item as
>completely "open" to interpretations other than those
>in mind of the writer? Clearly YOU must read recipes,
>instructions for use on the back of products; do you
>always question the intended meaning of THOSE "texts"?
>...a text is not a device for generating
>interpretations;there is always the
>"what-the-writer-had-in-mind" just as you had "in
>mind" certain things and not others when you wrote
>your reply; that Theory stuff sounds all sexy in a
>thesis, but try convincing yourself you DON'T have
>intentions when you write or that most of your peers
>won't arrive at the same gist...I didn't glean from
>your e-mail that it was "about" the post Civil War
>Reconstruction plans of the United States Government
>for example...what interpretations can be safely
>EXCLUDED (trillions at least ) far outnumber what
>interpretations can  be sanely affirmed in any given
>instance...the Umberto Eco example of Casanove hardly
>exemplifies an absurd, wildly arbitrary guess at a
>POSSIBLE, and I stress POSSIBLE, meaning;apparently no
>reader thought the "meaning" was really : ' a palace
>made of green Jello' and this extreme "interpretation"
>only serves to show that theory aside, in PRACTICE, if
>we are honest with how our minds are decoding when we
>read, there is a rather limited range of sensible
>meanings from any given 'text'...very
>limited...occasional discoveries like the Eco example
>are normal and may or may not be revealing of the
>author's incorporation of subconcious associations..in
>some cases yes, in others no...hermeneutics has
>asserted this since post-scholastic days at
>least...this trend in Theory is so much fun these days
>because it allows people to feel "empowered" rather
>than "under the spell" of the writer;We Don't Want the
>Writer Telling Us What to Think, blah blah blah...it's
>so ecumenical and socialist...Yay!....Look Folks! -
>Even the Author Has No Real Control Over His
>Material!!! Yeeeeee Haaaaaa!....I hope they don't feel
>that way next time they read a recipe for how to cook
>Sea Bass.....perhaps TheoryHeads should ask themselves
>what happens mentally when a Reader interprets a
>technical manuel or a set of instructions on how to
>program a DVD player before they go making Grand
>Unified Theories on literary "texts"....ever wonder
>about that? Waht, exactly, is the difference between a
>novel and a technical manuel? If Theory can't answer
>or even address that problem, it has rather little
>credibility trying to explicate the interpretive
>process of fiction....and my final caveat concerns not
>what Goes On in the interpreting mind of an
>Intellectual, who presumably has a lot of associative
>resources in his mind when reading a fiction work to
>play with, but how about what goes on in a border-line
>retarded person when he reads Moby Dick? Barthes was
>so stupid he never stopped to consider that if he's
>gonna make generalizations about the Human Thought
>Process Engaged in the Act of Reading a Text, he'd
>better not ONLY look at other educated high-I.Q. types
>just like himself; he'd better account for less gifted
>people, because, if you deign to generalize about the
>Human mind, it includes non-intellectuals as
>well..other wise you are NOT really thinking through
>your premises; you're only talking about your own
>"kind"....you're talking to your own fan club...when
>fiction writer sits down to write a novel he is not
>deciding to contrive a "device"; ( meta-fiction
>writers aside, and even Barth and Coover have Intent
>)Faulkner didn't write "devices"; he expressed the
>human motivations and actions of "all these characters
>living in my head , clamoring for articulation"...that
>perhaps may strike you as a completely foreign notion,
>since you seem to feel that writers are mere
>transceivers and not Creators....but the majority of
>novel writers in history would find this idea of
>"there is no 'I' behind the text" as psychologically
>untenable...ironically the very writers we read (
>again, except for post-WWII representatives ) would
>find all this as horseshit;Theory just grew bored and
>unhappy with the idea that writers are Directors of
>Their Created Worlds, so it jumped on a new view,
>that's all...in thirty years it will be something
>else; meanwhile fictin writers will feel the way they
>always felt when rendering the imaginary worlds in
>their minds....
>
>
>--- "

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