Theoretical boundaries

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 120396


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "arrowsmithbt" 
<arrowsmithbt at b...> wrote:

<snip>

> Kneasy:
> Unfortunately, yes; some posters seem to. 
> Why should anyone have the slightest interest in someone else's 
> emotional spasms (assuming they're genuine; not a given) about a 
> non-existent youth?

It's a rhetorical pose, but a fairly weak one, to state that emotion 
doesn't figure at all in the response and analysis to literature, or 
to most other things, such as it goes.  One can try to become aware 
of one's own feelings with fairly good success, but they are often 
the little-examined starting point for analysis--attempts to figure 
out 'why do I feel this way?'--which strongly color the end product.

To answer the question above, because the emotional response is one 
method of approaching a literary work, and as a list, we do not 
dictate a proper method of response.  The requirement that comments 
reference canon generates some empirical grounding instead of being 
purely subjective, but from there on, it's up to the individuals 
interested to talk about how they read this literature.  You can't 
make people read things they're not interested in (unless you're the 
teacher and assigning it; but I, for one, get enough of that every 
day), and it's very easy to ignore things that aren't interesting.

Perhaps a hybrid reading of the books might be interesting: how is 
Rowling-as-author trying to elicit emotional responses from readers?  
Partially subjective, of course, but an important component without 
which the books can be treated as a dry structuralist analysis.  Fun 
to start with, rather limited (IMHO) in the long run.

For instance, it's interesting to consider various emotional 
responses to (of course) Snape, a character where many people react 
very differently.  Why?  It's personal, yes, but it's not merely 
such; and to reduce Snape to a set of literary functions is not much 
fun, at least for me.  For me (myself, and I), it's interesting to 
note places where an emotional reaction (which is not necessarily 
knee-jerk) and a more critical analysis don't line up.  Ah, the 
frisson.

-Nora finds that in analyzing music, emotional responses often lead 
to uncovering the analytically most interesting parts, and is now 
tempted to use Lewin's phenomenological language to talk about fans