Btw, Doug, just finished Raymong Geuss's Outside Ethics, which contains various stuff that might interest you and some others here, including a lot of interesting stuff on Adorno.
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> Justin wrote:
>
> > > It doesn't make sense to conflate different
kinds of
> ambiguities as
> if they were all the same old Ambiguity.
Well, Empson distinguished Seven Types, one might do the same with Irony, but if Doug had in mind a particular target other than "commercial ambiguity," he was the one who conflated them.
Some
> ambiguities are
> purposefully included in the work.
Ah, the author's intention's. And Milton's intentions were, I believem to justify the ways of God to man, not to be of the devil's party . . . .
Whether Jack was
> really killed by
> gay-bashing homophobes unbeknownst to his wife who
> thinks that he
> died by accident or Ennis only imagined Jack's death
> by gay-bashing
> is an example of that. Ang Lee could have easily
> given one certain
> take on it if he had wanted to, but he didn't want
> to do so, so we
> don't know.
And you know Ang Lee's intentions because he explained them somewhere? And they are relevant because?
In the case of Jaws, the big shark is
> essentially a
> blank screen, on which you can choose to attribute
> an allegorical
> meaning (if you are desperate to come up with
> something to write
> about) despite an absence of allegorical clues in
> the film itself,
> but you don't necessarily have to -- you can simply
> see it as a big
> scary shark and enjoy being scared by it.
And this may not have been Spielberg's intention, if that is relevant? You know this how? And the difference is?
>
> "It's quite possible to read Birth of a Nation as a
> condemnation of
> the Klan," but few would, and few did when it
> mattered. Sometimes,
> propaganda films can backfire, with the audience
> reading them against
> their grain or making fun of them altogether, but
> there is no
> historical evidence for that in this case.
"HIstorical evidence" meaning, I guess, that Griffith did not intend the film to be anything but celebratory of the Klan (he said so) and it wasn't taken ina ny other way at the time. But I said: watch it now, and see if you can read it as anything but a condemnation of the KKK. Will explain if necessary.
>
> Really, works of art don't have to be ambiguous to
> be excellent.
> Potemkin is a good example of that.
So, there are unambiguous works of art. Very interesting. But if there are, I never said that ambiguity was a criterion of artistic excellence.
jks
>
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi
> <http://montages.blogspot.com>
> <http://monthlyreview.org>
> <http://mrzine.org>
>
>
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