Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2014-03-10 07:07 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2014-03-10 07:07 pm
[ SECRET POST #2624 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2624 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
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02.
[Outlander]
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03.
[The Walking Dead]
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04.
[How I Met Your Mother]
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05.
[Twitch Plays Pokemon]
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06.
[Batman, Kill La Kill, Borderlands]
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07.
[Overlord]
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08.
[Red Dwarf]
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09.
[Paranatural]
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10.
[Pitch Perfect]
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11.
[Insidious: Chapter 2]
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 053 secrets from Secret Submission Post #375.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-03-10 11:49 pm (UTC)(link)For those confused by it, here's the simplest explanation of the death of the author, or at least the one that was simple enough for me to finally get it: When a story is just in your head, it's all yours. But once you put it out into the world, it's not yours any more. It belongs as much to whoever reads it as it does to you.
no subject
I think that's a great way of putting it. I'd even say that essentially the thing that makes art and lit so powerful is the fact that viewers and readers are able to find things for themselves in it, regardless of what the author intended. It's what makes art, art.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-03-11 02:37 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-03-11 03:57 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-03-11 04:06 am (UTC)(link)The way I see it, any reader is perfectly free to interpret a book any way he or she likes, in a fashion that makes sense to them, but their point of view does NOT supersedes authorial intent.
I find it funny how intolerant the modern public is: just because YOU think the LoTR is about WWII, the author is wrong and any other interpretation of it is incorrect? Way to go, you narrow-minded person!
I like how you just bypass any other possibility and thoughtful opinion, simply because it's not yours... The whole point of books is to make us think and several meanings and important points can be made simultaneously in the same narrative, have you considered that? Good Lord, the need people have nowadays to impose their narrow-minded opinions on the rest of us is simply unbelievable! Have you heard of live and let live or is that too old-fashioned for you too?
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-03-11 10:08 am (UTC)(link)WWI, not WWII. And anyway, JRRT acknowledged that biographical/historical elements (like his involvement in WWI) were in some ways reflected in his work - he just didn't think that there were were the most important ones, and he was very much against that simplistic, reductive type of "work A is really and only (an allegory) about subject B" analysis. So I'm pretty sure he was the one who made the subtler interpretations of his and other people's works, and you're wrong.
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Actually plenty of people said it was about WW2. (It was published in 1954, it would have been somewhat odd if they hadn't.)
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-03-11 09:21 pm (UTC)(link)To get at what this means and square it with Tolkien's statements about his fiction, we have to look at what Tolkien said. What he said is that he did not write allegory. He did not say his fiction had nothing to do with reality; he said it was not allegory, and that's a very specific thing. Allegory is when there is an explicit and precise relationship between the events of a story and the author's intended meaning - the events of the story have meaning only insofar as they represent something outside it, for instance the story of Jesus Christ or the events of World War II. Tolkien was saying that he did not write this (and it's hard to say he was wrong, both because there's no textual evidence for his work being allegorical, and because it's hard to see how he could have written allegory unintentionally). At the heart of Tolkien's objection to allegory was the idea that in an allegory, the events of the story have no significance on their own terms, but only as personifications of something else.
So it's perfectly compatible to say that Lord of the Rings was about World War I and to agree with Tolkien's statement that it was not an allegory. The real experiences Tolkien underwent informed his writing and shaped his themes, his treatment of the matter, and the language he used to describe it - but the work stands on its own and cannot be reduced to a rewriting or either World War. And in writing it, we can think and interpret it in whatever broad sense we want - so long as we keep the story itself in view, the basic events of the text. And this is why we can say that LotR has more to do with the first world war than the second - because there is a much closer relationship in the text.
no subject