Neville/what's obvious (Culture, speaking, choice)

[lupinesque]

David wrote:

> Also Heidi said 
> something offlist about it being 'obvious' that JKR intends us to 
> think that Neville is under a memory charm.

<snip>

> it just wasn't obvious to me until Heidi pointed 
> it out.  I think that's because I don't ask myself what the author 
> intends when I read something, while I think that that is something 
> humanities students are encouraged to ask.  

Nope, that can't be it.  I'm as humanities-ish as one can get: 
religion major (thesis was on literature), art major; two more degrees 
in religion, with a bunch of literature courses and an MA exam on 
Romantic poetry mixed in; grew up in a theater-going, museum-hopping, 
book-dominated family; have a dad who literally quoted Shakespeare at 
the dinner table, quizzed us "What's that from?" and as often as not 
jumped up in the middle of the meal to grab the Yale Shakespeare and 
declaim a bit from Richard II.

Despite this literary training and the concomitant outlook, I do not 
think it's "obvious" that Neville is under a memory charm even after 
someone points out all the evidence.  There is such a thing as 
"obvious" in literature (it is obvious that McGonagall loves Quidditch 
even though there is no sentence saying "McGonagall loved Quidditch"), 
but the bar is quite high.  "Neville is under a memory charm" doesn't 
come close to meeting the standard, IMO.

I don't know where lawyers fit into the humanities/science continuum, 
but they do have a talent for spinning their conclusions so that they 
sound like the only obvious ones.  It's an important ability if you're 
in a line of work in which a plausible argument isn't enough; one is 
supposed to "win" the argument (an idea, IMO, that is foreign to 
right-thinking English literature scholars).

Amy
noting that Heidi hasn't piped up on this list in some time and hoping 
she'll swoop down to pick up the gauntlet