Anime has different visula cues from Western cartoons and that’s what makes it so confusing to many people. The tear drop is sweat meaning the character is nervous about something.
Another example is the nose bleed charaters get. In Western cartoons, if a character is really excited by a beautiful woman, his eyes bug out of his head. In Japanese cartoons, he gets a nose bleed because he’s so turned on his entire body has filled up with blood.
What my post is objecting to is this ridiculous notion that the stated views of the author, etc, are irrelevant to understanding the text. That they are not always definitive I’ll accept, but irrelevant? That’s just horseshit. That would imply that there is nothing to be learned from looking at the life and views of an author, or the cultural milieu in which she wrote. Nothing at all? Well, you said “irrelevant”. Not merely “not fully authoritative”, but “irrelevant”. And again, I say that’s horseshit. There’s nothing to be added to one’s understanding of Macbeth by learning that Shakespeare wrote it for James II? Nothing at all? Ooookay.
As for Freud, I was under the impression that psychologists these days think he was mostly wrong. You might want to read up on that.
I have, believe me, far more than is probably healthy. Psychologists, yes, English critics, less so: although outright Freudianism is currently rather unfashionable, as I alluded in my last post, most New Criticism {which is actually fairly old now} applies Freud’s methods less in “phallic symbol spotting” than in the sense that the text is viewed similarly to an author’s subconscious, and is thus open to analysis beyond his or her stated or surface intentions.
This is a vast and complicated subject, and I’m simplifying greatly, partly because I’m 15 years out of practice and too old and tired to read up on my references again, but also because I honestly don’t feel like embarking on a discussion of the relative merits of various critical schools. I am however genuinely attempting to cast some light on the whole process of analysing for subtext, and I would take it kindly if you would drop the sarcastic tone.
There’s the added understanding that apparently MacBeth was written 150 years earlier than previously thought!
Thing is, you’re trying to have it both ways. Now the author’s unconscious psychology is relevant to interpretation, but conscious intentions aren’t? That’s practically incoherent.
Look, as I said, I’m fine with saying that the author’s statements about what was meant isn’t the be-all and end-all in divining the meaning of a text. But decreeing that intentions are irrelevant is just ridiculous. Writing is an intentional act. It’s intention that imbues it with meaning in the first place. That’s the difference between a chimpanzee that happens to type a grammatically correct sentence by happenstance, and a person who types that same sentence. The person can form the intent to mean something. The chimpanzee can’t. (Though it might be able to form the intent to mean something by hand signals - by typing not so much.) Thinking intention is relevant to meaning is a capital-F Fallacy? That’s just failing to understand what meaning is.
Ah heck, what’s an I or two between friends? :smack:
I haven’t heard that one- please elaborate.
Many have argued for a gay subtext in the Paul-Timothy correspondence of the NT.
In the movie Osama I got the impression that the old perv who weds her in the end was an ephebophile whose taste was young boys, explaining perhaps his contempt for his wives and certainly his obvious lust for Osama from the first time he sees him/her. (This is not to imply any gay-pedophilia connection of course, but with ephebophiles the gender of the victimized usually is related to the orientation of the perpetrator.)
God what a disturbing ending to that movie, incidentally.
Now Orlando would be a great debate as to when and where and to what extent the gay sub-text lies.
I’ve sensed gay sub-text in Milton’s Paradise Lost but I can’t remember exactly what it was at the moment. Bother.
Gorsnak typoed “James II” for “James I,” which I pretended to misunderstand as referring to James II of Scotland instead of James I of England.
…aw, it’s less funny when you spell it out. :smack:
Well, remember, kids: “subtext” is just an anagram for “buttsex”!
Well I’ll be damned… :eek:
I seem to be doing an awfully bad job of explaining this, but I think you missed a crucial “similarly” in the post you quoted. It was an analogy between a critic’s analysis of a text and a psychoanalyst’s analysis {that reads strangely tautologically} of a patient’s subconscious.
It was probably a confusing analogy, but if we treat the text {not the author; I’m not suggesting that anyone psychoanalyse him or her as a person} as the “patient”, or subject for analysis, a reading of subtext {which is not necessarily a psychoanalytic one: it might well be a Marxist analysis, for example}, is analogous to the psychoanalyst’s interpretation of the patient’s subconscious.
I don’t really have any disagreement with your second paragraph: I think that Wimsatt and Beardsley, Private Investigators, did overstate their case in saying that an author’s intentions were irrelevant. As you say, though, they’re not the be-all and end-all, which was really why I brought up the intentional fallacy {I’ll type it in lower-case} in the first place, in reponse to Captain Amazing’s post in which he said “If Tolkein {sic} didn’t intend it, how is it there? I mean, they’re his characters.”
Yes, what the author says later is irrelevent. It may help you interpret the text, but it’s not the text, so it doesn’t really count. If it’s important, it should be in the text. Your job as an author is to convey meaning through the text, if you failed, you failed, shut up about it. If it bothers you that much, learn to write better.
Not to mention writers are people. People change their minds, and they lie, and they forget how to write their own characters and end up with Anita Blake. They write beautiful works of art, and then you find out that they’re small-minded bigots who belong to the KKK. I don’t care what my authors think. I only care that they write well and often.