Themes and theories

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, Sean Dwyer <ewe2 at a...> wrote:

> Sean:
> This is a quote I fear encourages many an HPfGU fan to avoid the 
> wider view of the books; I don't blame them since it's a very 
> disappointing gaffe by JKR IMHO, although not without a certain 
> irony. If Harry goes off into the figurative desert, I shall have 
> to write to the Times.

Gaffe?  Funny, it looks to me like she was just expressing one of the 
sources for what will eventually happen in the series.  And wouldn't 
any 'wider' view of the books want to take this into account and not 
dismiss it off-hand?

Frankly, the continual dismissal of JKR's comments about her own 
works boggles me more than slightly.  In my own professional line of 
work, there are so many times that I'd absolutely *kill* to have 
comments like these, not as complete prescriptives for analysis and 
interpretation, but for an enriched understanding of context.  I do 
think that context matters, particularly as...

Barthesian hard post-modern indeterminacy is dead.  Deader than a 
doornail.  The author is back alive in some way, shape, or form, and 
context matters; the "so what?" ending Barthes ultimately takes you 
to is rather unsatisfactory.  It is an equally arbitrary offense to 
say that "The word of the author is absolute law!" as to say 
that "The word of the author is completely meaningless, free 
interpretation is everything!".  I find it's often useful to take 
authors into consideration about their own works, even when it's no 
longer a WIP.  When it *is* a work in progress, the authorial 
comments can be an excellent heuristic, as has been pointed out in 
other threads.

If it plays out in line with what JKR said on the religious angle, 
that will be there; but there's really no way that it will be the 
*only* thing there.  Hence is the difference between literature and 
propaganda, and there's no reason to believe that the former will 
become the latter at this stage in time.

-Nora notes that there's a big meta post in there somewhere about the 
metaphors we use to describe interpretation, but nobody here probably 
wants to hear about Schenker