URTH |
From: Michael Straight <straight@email.unc.edu> Subject: RE: (urth) Readerly/writerly and Pierre Menard Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 08:15:49 On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Jim Henley wrote: > This came up before. But this seems a good place to adduce Borges' "Pierre > Menard." The narrator of that story claims that Menard's rewrite of > Cervantes produces a radically new text. But Borges makes it pretty clear > that the narrator of that story is a jerk, and maybe a fool. So... Interesting. What makes you read it that way rather than as Borges himself narrating with his tongue firmly in his cheek? _The Imitation of Christ_ by James Joyce is still on my must-read-someday list. > > Just because we can't quantifiably have a 'correct' reading, it > > doesn't necessarily follow that we can't distinguish between 'good' > > and 'bad' readings. > > This is superb! I don't suppose you could manage to appear at the sacred > windows of every high school english class in the land, could you? It would > eliminate a host of sorrows. I agree too, but would add that it makes sense only within a community of readers that has decided on some criteria for 'good' and 'bad'. Crowley's _Little, Big_ is almost certainly not intended as Christian allegory, but if Jim Jordan enjoyed reading it that way, I wouldn't insist that his reading was 'bad,' particulary if he wasn't arguing that his was the only 'right' way to read it. -Rostrum *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/