The Dresden Files

Zombie T-rex is best and none of you will ever be able to change my mind on this.

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This guy knows what's up. Sue 4 life!

Well obvio9usly, but, that is just SO awesome, so amazing, and som unbeatable that, it just goes without saying. We just have to work out what comes second.

Well, he did shoot Santa Claus in the face during a motorbike chase.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

I like how how Harry is this close to being a comicbook superhero.

Harry is a comic book superhero. He has done heroic things, using super powers, in a comic book.

I dunno, his clothing is kinda loose.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

Didn't Jim say at one point that he's building Harry up into full superhero status for the BAT?

edited 19th Oct '14 5:21:44 PM by kingtiger522

So in order to avoid having conversations about the shit we read we take a completely reductive, fact-driven view of the story we tell?

Here's the thing: The facts of the story are almost wholly in the purview of the author, completely outside the control of the reader. The author has put the "facts" of the story in there, or the clues in there, for people to get, and the only thing they really "own" is their reactions to them. That's not Death of the Author - if anything that's a reinforcement of authorial control, and a presupposition that a story is divorced from culture rather than actively being a part of how culture is shaped.

Hell, even simple things like labeling Michael a good man (which he arguably is) is a product of culture because Michael is the Western idea of how we expect truly noble men to behave. The behaviors of each character and how they relate to peoples' general opinion of them is colored by the culture through which they view the story. The facts of the story are, and I'm sorry for saying this, the fucking dullest part, because for the most part they're the pieces that we keep using over and over again in different permutations. The real heart and soul of a story is theming, metaphor, cultural relevance, stuff like that.

And yeah, my favorite bits are the zombie dinosaurs, explosions and wizards too. I just wish it wasn't interrupted every five chapters with Harry giving a flowery description of a young woman's tits. Because fuck that noise.

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.

The 'facts' are the most important part, and the only one that matters because those are the things from which everything else is drawn.

Micheal is a 'good man' based on what, in the story's 'verse, is considered 'good'. Yes it's all based on outside stuff and real life and blah blah blah, but it's IN story that matters. Anything else, anything outside it, has nothing to really do with the story, but with each person.

The thing is, I have yet to see any "Deep literary criticism" that didn't just come off like someone blowing a lot of pseudo-intellectual hot air, and/or forcing their own issues onto the story and twisting things to make it 'say' what they want it to say.

The story is about only what it contains, only what goes on within the confines of the stories 'verse. But that can be applicable to any number of real life situation, view, etc....

This discussion reminds me of that picture with the circle graph about what the author means and what your English teacher thinks he means.

Exactly my point

And yes you can probably blame this attitude on how many English teachers I had that did nothing but spout endless BS about this stuff. (Not saying this stuff is BS, but the stuff my teachers were going about sure was.) And just, ran this whole "You have to only care about what the author was trying to say," and, "All the matters is what deeper meaning this story says about society as a whole" and stuff like that. While I was just interested in the story for the sake of being a story.

And, that was a really entertaining class for everyone else, since, everyone in school knew I was far and a way the biggest bookworm in that building. And read more then half the rest of the students and teacher combined. So they got to at least once a week or so just sit back and watch me and teacher have more or less this exact argument.

Seraphem could you plese tone down the rethoric a bit? For you it may constitute "BS" but for others its a valid field of study and literacy criticism.

To the uneducated things may always come off as "hot air" and so. If I'd started going on about epigenetics or the existence of retroviral dna in the human genome, the dear humanist "scientists" (*wink*) might think the same about that thematic

I'd also make a point that there is possibly a serious difference between school-level analysis and college/beyond level of literary scholarship, so maybe consider that your experiences are not all encompassing on that front.

edited 20th Oct '14 5:26:41 AM by 3of4

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@Serapham Man, I would have hated being in IB English II with you. I had a similar attitude to you during the year one version of the class but by year two I actually found literary analysis to be interesting and fun and actually made the stories worth discussing because they don't exist in a vacuum.

Understanding culture, society, and the human-ness of the author makes all this stuff more enriching. I could read a story for just the story but I've far grown out of that.

But I also had an extremely good IB English II teacher. Like, Extremely good. Like amazingly good. Like the dude was perfect in every way.

Anyhow, the more I read this the more difficult I find It to sympathize with your point of view because it just feels so limited and limiting, and it seems a little intellectually dishonest to try to take everything at face value like that.

edited 20th Oct '14 5:22:00 AM by MousaThe14

The Blog The Art

I think taking everything at face value is basically the other extreme side of the spectrum from

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It is, but I couldn't think of a better term.

The Blog The Art

1) That's because, and I'm guessing you've been introduced to it the same way I was, schools tend to very rigidly define different types of interpretations and then introduce them all separately rather than trying to make literary criticism a holistic discipline. As a discipline, it's a lot more than "pseudo-intellectual hot air," especially when you get into, say, the idea of culture as a social experience.

2) That's part of the point. In the conceptualization of death of the author, or at least in a postmodern "audience participation" sense, what an individual brings to the reading is part of the process of criticism. The notion of divorcing your own perspective from a work or how it's received is nonsense, because again, it presupposes this notion that anything created by human beings is apolitical. And it isn't, under any circumstances. Even the hard sciences.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying a story for being a story. But there's an art behind the craft of writing that's infinitely more interesting.

This is technically video games, but a lot of the same stuff applies: "Keep Your Politics Out of My Games."

edited 20th Oct '14 5:42:32 AM by math792d

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.

I'm not saying the whole field is BS, just nearly every bit of it I've been subjected to by every English teacher I've ever had.

Everything stems from the facts of the story, they are the base level that everything else builds up from, not what came before, not anything about the author, other then in trivia form or "Hmm, that's interesting." kind of ways. What amtters is the story, what is taking place inside that 'verse.

Except that is science, stuff that can be proven with facts. That is plain, explainable, repeatable, and that will always be what it is. (Baring us finding new information that alters what it means. But the basic facts will still be there, just more information alters the conclusions drawn from them.

The literary stuff, is the complete and total opposite of that. It has no solid base. It is all dependent on each person, everyone has their own view on it, every 'analysis' that looks past the basic story and tries to bring in stuff from outside it ends up being based in part on the persons own views. There are no facts there. Nothing to form a solid, provable base. Other then what goes in inside the story.

And, things are what they are before anything else. They might also be applicable to other situations, but first they must be something of their own.

((And yes I have a very hard time at getting most metaphors, and even sarcasm a lot of time because I always view things as being exactly what they are rather then meaning something totally different.))

Just because I acknowledge it as fact doesn't prevent someone uneducated from dismissing it, because he doesn't understand it. Thats one of the prime issues why Intelligent Design is still around.

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But fact is fact, if they choose to ignore it, that is their own stupidity. But it is nonetheless a fact.

"The great thing about science, is it's true whether you believe in it or not"

The literary stuff, is only true for those that believe in each specific interpretation.

Really? How is their dismissial of science different from your dismissal of literature science?

The fact that science is observed fact is unimportant to that argument, imo.

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On the actual topic of Dresden Files... if Michael is explicitly said to be a 'good man', I'm pretty sure that even if there's no attributed narrator, that's supposed to be from within Harry's head. The books' language is so heavily peppered with his viewpoint and general snarkiness that even when he's not explicitly narrating, he's narrating.

Not that Michael isn't a good guy.

And as for my viewpoint on the Doylist/Watsonian divide. While more information about a writer can inform your idea of what he/she intended, as can information about his or her time period, I think it's a general thing about art that it should stand on its own. It may be able to be interpreted multiple ways, and that's great, and maybe intentional. Or maybe there is one particular way the artist wants it to be interpreted. But it's the piece itself that, through the artist's craft and intuition, is meant to be contemplated. You can examine how a piece does its thing, rhetorical devices and such. You can examine perhaps citations of other works or things that an artist reasonably expects his/her audience to understand and perhaps is no longer common knowledge, because they were speaking to the people of their time. What is being shown, what is expected to do the trick, though, is the piece and only the piece. If you need extensive knowledge of the author/painter/musician to get the desired effect... I dare say that it's not doing its job.

edited 20th Oct '14 6:20:00 AM by PointMaid

This. More or less. Both parts.

and have to get to work or would do more.

And no that is center to the issue. That one is observable, provable, hard fact, the other, is entirely mutable and exists only in the minds of each person, and in different forms. That it entirely depends on each persons own POV rather then a hard, definite set of facts.

edited 20th Oct '14 6:02:11 AM by Seraphem

"God does not play dice." - Albert Einstein, in dismissing quantum theory because of its inherent randomness.

Like I said, even the sciences are political.

Yeah, but even if it's filtered through Harry's perception, it's still obvious that Michael's portrayed as the Western ideal of a "good man."

And I agree that the author isn't relevant to the discussion, but author =/= culture.

edited 20th Oct '14 6:08:53 AM by math792d

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.

While Seraphim takes it a bit too far, I do think that oftentimes the product of literary analysis ends up being more about the reader than the work.