Victory for TEWWW EWWW?? Snape the hero

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 173161

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "leslie41" <leslie41 at ...> wrote:
>
> As for JKR's comment on the Today Show regarding Snape, I find it 
> very interesting, fascinating in fact, but pretty much irrelevant.
> 
> Though it makes for excellent television, *any* author's opinion on 
> their own text is only of limited value. Authorial intent is not 
> even considered in any serious literary criticism. What's considered 
> is what's actually in the text.  

Actually, authorial intent has made something of a comeback since the
days of Wimsatt and Beardsley, especially for those of us who do
historically related work as opposed to New Criticism, but also in
more abstract philosophical senses.  But that's a complete tangent,
and I'm sure that my field has engaged differently with the issues
than some others.

Where I find Rowling's comments useful is in what I like to think of
as a calculus of effort regarding interpretation.  Step back a few
books to pre-OotP (what a fun time that was onlist!).  At this time,
Snapetheories ran wild, and many of them were devoted to explaining
his seemingly nasty behavior to the students as part of a plan,
something with an explicit reason.

Now, this takes some work.  You have to strap a lot of "this is what
is in the text, BUT this is what it will actually be revealed as being
a part of..." onto things.  At the time, this was work worth doing, in
part because there were several books to go and a few reveals would do
a lot.  Unfortunately, what's come around now is that given the lack
of a reveal, the amount of work starts to seem (to me) superfluous. 
It reminds me of a student doing analysis on something with a
relatively steady style like Handel and coming up with strange chords
that take a lot of work to explain, while if you read it in a
different key, it's very easy.

I've always used Rowling's comments as a heuristic--what lines of
inquiry and explanation are likely to get actual payoff, and which are
not.  YMMV, but I tend to discard lines of inquiry that don't get any
actual realization.

> Rowling's idea of "heroism" seems to the standard Christian ideal 
> of "doing good for the right reasons".  Any dip into any heroic 
> literature at all will reveal that most heroes do no such thing.  
> 
> Would Achilles have fought in The Iliad if Patroklos had not been 
> killed?  No. Does that make him less of a hero?  Obviously not. 

It manifestly depends on your definition of heroism, which I think is
all that Rowling was saying in the first place--that she didn't see
him as a hero, especially within the framework she constructed in the
novels.

We, of course, are free to make whatever arguments that we wish, so
long as we also define our terms.

-Nora goes hunting for wherever she put her volume of Iser