On Sat, 13 Nov 2010 21:18:48 -0600 "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
> Joanna wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Miles Jackson" <cqmv at pdx.edu>
>
> "I'd say the prevailing ideology is that the Artist should be able
> to
> articulate the True Meaning of the Work. For me, this assumption
> reflects
> the capitalist concept of the person as an autonomous, personally
> responsible individual."
Note to Miles: The behavioral psychologist, B.F. Skinner, came to similar conclusions in some very brief reflections that he had on literature in his book, "About Behaviorism."
>
> Joanna] It's a mixed bag. I don't believe the artist is expected to
> articulate the true meaning of the work.
>
> ------
>
> Carroo: Do you really believe there is such a thing as the "Truee
> Meaning"
> of a work of art.
>
> (Digression: I would argue that "work of art" is itself is
> historical: that
> is, works of art onlyu exist within certain historical contexts.
> They begin
> to appear in the late 17th-c, but it is arguable that they did not
> yetr
> fully exist een for Wordsworth and Coleridge. I personally doubt
> the
> usefulness of the concept. Shakespare neer dreamt that he was
> producing
> anything remotely like a "work of art" - his works were turned into
> works of
> art in the mid-19fth-c. It's time to discard the concept)
Didn't the Dadaists attempt to do that in the early 20th century? It seems that their challenge failed, since after all, Dadaists works are displayed in museums as "works of art," along side the works of Impressionists or post-Impressionists, etc. It may require a fundamental change in the social order before we can finally get beyond the concept.
>
> Meaning, whatever it is,is a relation, not something that inheres in
> a text,
> a building, a painting, a sonata. Rther it i.s a relationship, under
> given
> historical condtions, between the text and the reader. And that
> relationship, of course, is itself social. The novel, as a genre, is
> defined
> as a personal relationship between implied narrator and implied
> reader, and
> it is that generic gesture which makes possible the convention of
> the
> undependable narrator. (I don't know what you mean whenyou refer to
> the
> "truth-value of the narration." The narration is itslf. What other
> "truth"
> value should it have?) This is the reason for considering the novel
> as _the_
> genre of bourgeois society: its definition as a genere incorporates
> the core
> bourgeois myth of autonomous individuals, existing prior to and
> independently of social relations, forming such relations by an act
> of wil.
> It mimes that myth doubly: by the new society created when the rader
> picks
> up the novel, thereby forming a social relation where before there
> was only
> the novelsist and the reader - two isolated monads. And the 'inside'
> of the
> narrative, in one way or another, imitates the primordial "novel"
> -- the
> marriage of Adam & Eve in PL, to which the novel forms a magnificent
> seriesd
> of footnotes. If and when the individualized social order created
> by
> capitalism disappears, the novels of Richardson & Austen, Stendahl
> &
> Flaubert, Tolstoi & Wolfe & Faulkner will take on a radically
> different
> "true meaning" from what they have for us.
That raises the question, which is probably unanswerable, which is what would role would the novel have in a future communist society? Would people even bother to write works which would be recognizable by us as novels?
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
>
> Joanna: The critics are supposed to do that.
>
> Carrol: Only if they too believe in the bourgeois myth of the one
> true
> meaning of a person or a text.
>
>
> I may come back to this post. It offers many fascinatihng points of
> departure.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
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