Note to world: hating a "great work" is a sign that hater actually read it. World has my permission to hang up by their toenails any and all who dismiss a work unread; but those who dismiss a work in the fulness of information -- those are people expressing an opinion. An opinion that may be 100% wrongheaded and in disagreement with me, but legitimate response nonetheless.

On the identification front, I find that having an emotional connection to a book is what makes it alive, for me. It's why books matter, don't you think? Not Reader-Mary-Sue ID, but This Struggle Is Still Relevant ID. (For example, I'm told that Austen books are wildly popular in India, because they dramatize the very current problem, in India, of marrying for your family's sake, or for love, or both.) People see parts of themselves in the characters and in what actions and mistakes the characters make, and say Yes, I know you in all your messiness. Isn't that valuable? Isn't that a way of seeing into other people's lives?

On some thought, I think my version of "identification" is identifying with a problem, and not just with a character. I don't cry for Laura Bounderby in Hard Times because I love her; I cry for her because she has a long dark teatime of the soul, and doesn't know what to do, and strikes out in lonely, frightened blindness and finds her father's heart. That sudden, mournful rapprochement -- it was the culmination of Dickens's thesis about "scientific" instruction being cruel and empty.

Most of the critical thinking people have talked about wanting is the kind that springs from that visceral place; it just goes beyond the love of the work itself to wanting to eat the author's spicy brain

Which JZ said much more succinctly, and with the phrase "spicy brains".

My main reaction to that was "OK, I guess you could read it that way. Or maybe that's just the color of walls in a building that age."

I think a good example of this is the scene in Innocence, where Buffy is looking for Angel, and goes to his house and finds him shirtless and he rips her emotions to shreds. Now, I don't know Joss personally. But listening to his commentary, he is 100% right that that emotional scene happening with one of the characters half-naked, in a private space, has a hugely different impact from having it take place outside with all in woolly coats. I don't know that it says something about him personally, but it does say Here are the choices I made, as author, and here is the outcome of those choices.

So a lot of modern litcrit is subjective, then? Many of the pronouncements I've seen have tended heavily toward objective, received truth.

The tone is a product of how criticism is "supposed to be written" -- i.e. that you're proving something, presenting a coherent case to the jury of your peers. (They don't have to buy it.) But I don't think litcrit is all subjective, so much as ... like looking at inkblots and saying why you think they're all scary evil bugs or dancing clowns or whatever. There's a certain element of "that's how it looks to me", but it ultimately has to be grounded in evidence from the text. That evidence can be totally contradictory, or ambiguous, or even unintentional on the author's part, but if you can point to a line that backs up your interpretation, you've found something valid. (Just not the only thing valid in that text.)

I'll agree with those who find the "you're being unintellectual" camp kind of didactic and insulting. I do think of myself as an intellectual, and I loathe being tarred with as indiscriminate a brush as I'm being accused of using on literature. If one is going to call me on being reductive or dismissive or crude, it sort of behooves one to not use the same tactics in one's objection!

What I personally disliked about the tone of hayden, Hec, and Michele's posts was the air of "you people are doing it wrong, sit down and listen while I explain it to you."

If you see that in my posts, you're putting it there yourself. As is Steph, who called me rude without further comment.

If someone wants to say nothing more about Pride and Prejudice than "DARCY! OMG WOOBIE! FLAIL!!!!" that's fine by me. But, as David and hayden both pointed out, when any attempts to have a discussion that engages both the heart and the mind get shut down, when the standard response to, say, Ulysses is, "hated it, boring, next?" then it's more than fair for someone to come in and say "this community is actively hostile to the way I read, and I don't like it."

And as to the Music thread -- anyone who's missed the big love in there for, among other things, Justified, "Toxic," and other radio-friendly unit shifters hasn't been paying attention. Hell, this whole morning has been about the Beatles.

I could go into a whole rant about the self-defeating foolishness of of getting defensive around people who have more deep knowledge of a topic than you do rather than trying to exchange knowledge with them as equals in the way a forum like this allows you to, but really, fuck it. I have more useful things to do.

Yeah, no tone of superiority there.

World has my permission to hang up by their toenails any and all who dismiss a work unread

I'm not sure how far I'd go with this. It's perfectly legit not to read, say, the Harry Potter novels because of a lack of interest in fantasy. What would irk me is if such a person called the HP novels "crap" instead of "not my sort of thing."

As is Steph, who called me rude without further comment.

What further comment do you want? Here's the statement that I called rude:

I do not, as my homies say, see myself represented within the discursive community formed here, and both the self-congratulation and the reverse snobbery tend to actively repel me.

Further comment: "self-congratulation," "reverse snobbery," and "repel" are being used to describe a thread in which I participate. I find those terms to be rude, because I can't put a positive spin on those terms.

when the standard response to, say, Ulysses is, "hated it, boring, next?" then it's more than fair for someone to come in and say "this community is actively hostile to the way I read, and I don't like it."

Can someone say "hated it, boring"? Is expressing a negative opinion about a book that you want to discuss in depth automatically an attempt to hijack the thread into moving on and discussing Sidney Sheldon?

A good way to create appreciation of Shakespeare's comedies might be to begin with, "Shakespeare wrote the way people talked then. He used a lot of current slang. So if something sounds dirty, he very well may have intended it that way." Problem is, school boards aren't going to take that attitude very well.

This is exactly how my junior and senior year English teachers in high school taught it. One of my friends and I ended up flinging Shakespearean insults at each other for most of senior year. (Of course, my freshman year English teacher took the "This is the right way to interpret this story" approach. But my response was, "You're an idiot." Which I never did say to her face in exactly those words, but got pretty close a few times.)

What would irk me is if such a person called the HP novels "crap" instead of "not my sort of thing."

What would irk me is if that person said, in the middle of a Harry Potter discussion "I hate those books! Let's talk about Lemony Snicket!" Because that's a deliberate attempt to de-rail.

But, honestly. I don't want to deconstruct a book -- Great Book or otherwise -- that I didn't enjoy. I don't mind other people deconstructing it, but this isn't college, and therefore I don't *have* to discuss a book I don't like.

What would irk me is if such a person called the HP novels "crap" instead of "not my sort of thing."

So, to take that back to the discussion of canon, what makes it okay to say "No thanks, I don't like fantasy" and not okay to say "No thanks, I don't like whaling?" Why is one percieved as an expression of individual taste and the other percieved as a hostile attack on intellectualism?

(Note that I'm only using Moby Dick as an example because it's the book that started all this. I have no feelings or opinions about the book one way or another.)

One of my friends and I ended up flinging Shakespearean insults at each other for most of senior year.

When we read Hamlet senior year, our teacher had us make tee-shirts with a quote from the play, and an illustration (if we were artistically inclined), and got permission for us to wear them all day (because we wore uniforms).

The only reason we didn't get beaten up for being such geeks is because it was an all-girls' school, and they didn't go for physical violence; they merely shunned and sniped.

It's perfectly legit not to read, say, the Harry Potter novels because of a lack of interest in fantasy. What would irk me is if such a person called the HP novels "crap" instead of "not my sort of thing."

I think I will be merciful to Fred's toenails this one time. He has a point.

Then again, sometimes I love to get into detail of why I hated a book, rip it to shreds right out in the open. I harbor the secret possibility that I will convince people who theretofore liked the book to hate it too!

Also agreed that Michele is not coming across as less insulting right now.