ITTOL - Lecture 5 - The Idea of the Autonomous Artwork
This lecture focuses on the idea that a poem (or literary work) is best judged on its own terms, without reference to external opinions, notes, or the readers emotional response to the work. This premise is a component of The New Criticism, a movement associated with Yale but not formulated solely within their walls. They introduced the practice of close reading; which Prof Fry describes as
[Note: Re-read the essay The Intentional Fallacy today and realized this particular quote from Shelley is not mentioned; not quite sure where I pulled it from but I think the point about an author's intention is still valid. 2014-04-02]
The essay has a wonderful quote from Shelley's Adonais
The words also imply a religious element since many-colored glass brings to mind the stained glass windows of a church; so life is like a church and a means of approaching the radiance of God (the eternal) or possibly the church stains the radiance of God; religious thinking about God stains God. There are a multitude of ways to approach those lines that spring wholly from the lines themselves. Does my interpretation conflict with Hirsch's meaning vs significance? Is thinking many-colored glass is synonymous with stained glass breaking an interpretative rule? I don't think so, stained glass is essentially coloured glass. And it has always been used in churches. Haven't read enough of Hirsch to know how he handled multiple meanings or even if he accepted that there were multiple meanings to a single text. Does meaning have a one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many relationship with significance? Are the meanings of the words in the lines relative to other words in the lines? Does that need to be worked out first? Is the significance of the text subject to the individual meanings assigned to the words? Would the lines have the same significance if many-colored glass was not seen to have a meaning synonymous with stained glass? Or should many-colored glass only be seen as stained glass as the very next piece of text is the word stains? Could one argue that Shelley, in these two lines, only meant stained glass? If that's the case, is he only talking about religious life? Or is the double meaning deliberate? Is it legitimate to look at the lines as descriptive of two forms of life? Or, two means of looking (glass/window) at life?
lol...who would have thought two lines could give me such a headache! My digression; however, does seem to support the premise of The Intentional Fallacy, trying to guess at what Shelley actually intended by the lines is pointless. Even if I could ask him, would he know today what his original intention was? Does it matter? Keep thinking of Joseph Campbell's comment: If you want to insult an artist, ask him what his work means. If he wants to insult you, he'll tell you. I certainly don't want to insult Shelley, and I'm glad he chose not to insult me as a reader.
...the idea that you could take a text and do things with it--that the interpretation of a text wasn't just a matter of saying, "Oh, yes, it's about this and isn't it beautiful?"--reciting the text, emoting over it, enthusing about it, and then looking around for something else to say--it was no longer a question of doing that. It was a question of constructing an elaborate formal edifice to which everybody could contribute.The authors of The Intentional Fallacy support this view of interpreting a text on its own and allow for three basic forms of textual evidence (1) the language used in the text, (2) the variety of common meanings for certain words, and (3) the idiosyncratic uses of language known to belong to the author. They discount the value of attempts to discover the author's original intention in producing the work:
...the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as the standard for judging the success of a work of literary art...They argue that, if the poet has succeeded, the poem itself shows his intent and if he's failed, the poem is not adequate evidence; you can only discover he failed by looking to externals for evidence of his original intent.
[Note: Re-read the essay The Intentional Fallacy today and realized this particular quote from Shelley is not mentioned; not quite sure where I pulled it from but I think the point about an author's intention is still valid. 2014-04-02]
The essay has a wonderful quote from Shelley's Adonais
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,which the intentionalist critic, Allen Tate, says "does not grow out of the material" but is "imposed from above". If find his critical comment quite odd, possibly because the essay does not include his whole criticism; however, Shelley's words appear to stand quite well on their own and as the entire poem is an elegy, one would think that in talking about death it is natural to also talk about life, given that death is impossible without life. It actually makes me wonder why Shelley wrote such a long poem given that those two lines encompass so much of what can be said about life: it is as fragile as glass, it temporarily (a dome is removable) separates us from eternity or heaven (as dome connotes the "dome of heaven"), its stains are as ephemeral as the colours seen through colored glass, it contains eternity in that white is formed of all the colours. Are those the meanings Shelley intended? I've no idea, but it is some of what his words imply.
Stains the white radiance of eternity
The words also imply a religious element since many-colored glass brings to mind the stained glass windows of a church; so life is like a church and a means of approaching the radiance of God (the eternal) or possibly the church stains the radiance of God; religious thinking about God stains God. There are a multitude of ways to approach those lines that spring wholly from the lines themselves. Does my interpretation conflict with Hirsch's meaning vs significance? Is thinking many-colored glass is synonymous with stained glass breaking an interpretative rule? I don't think so, stained glass is essentially coloured glass. And it has always been used in churches. Haven't read enough of Hirsch to know how he handled multiple meanings or even if he accepted that there were multiple meanings to a single text. Does meaning have a one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many relationship with significance? Are the meanings of the words in the lines relative to other words in the lines? Does that need to be worked out first? Is the significance of the text subject to the individual meanings assigned to the words? Would the lines have the same significance if many-colored glass was not seen to have a meaning synonymous with stained glass? Or should many-colored glass only be seen as stained glass as the very next piece of text is the word stains? Could one argue that Shelley, in these two lines, only meant stained glass? If that's the case, is he only talking about religious life? Or is the double meaning deliberate? Is it legitimate to look at the lines as descriptive of two forms of life? Or, two means of looking (glass/window) at life?
lol...who would have thought two lines could give me such a headache! My digression; however, does seem to support the premise of The Intentional Fallacy, trying to guess at what Shelley actually intended by the lines is pointless. Even if I could ask him, would he know today what his original intention was? Does it matter? Keep thinking of Joseph Campbell's comment: If you want to insult an artist, ask him what his work means. If he wants to insult you, he'll tell you. I certainly don't want to insult Shelley, and I'm glad he chose not to insult me as a reader.