Totally with you, she says, reading quickly... and I like way your mind works at least in terms of this "thought process." One thing I hated about grad school was the idea that folks could take stuff totally out of context and say, "Well, look, it must mean this." And that pissed me right off.
Not to give myself too much credit, but I didn't do that. Well, OK, there was the time I tried to argue that Goneril and Regan had reasons for the way they acted in King Lear, but that was about exploring the argument. As I mentioned on my journal, I was big on structure, yes, and at my best, I exceled at being able to dig into a text and find meaning and evidence to support it. I approached literary criticism as science... if there wasn't evidence, I didn't go there. But I often saw others that just went all over the place, and it's one reason I left grad school, because things just had the potential to get silly silly silly!
I agree that labeling someone as misunderstood is a really cheap way to argue a point and I see why you pounced on it. Note that I'm not in anyway trying to continue the debate... I'm done for now and may come back after I've read things through again. I think what I was trying to get at is that I was sensing that Jon was *written* to be misunderstood. It's just that there were points, particularly that whole sequence between Dan and Laurie where we see Jon getting ready for the interview, where what was being said about him wasn't syncing for me with what I was seeing in the panels. And that commentary made me think that some of the dismissal of him as dispassionate and disconnected by the other characters (especially Laurie) was something Moore wanted us to examine. Particularly in light of the trajectory of Chapter IV.
But yeah, this has all really got me thinking about the way I read and the whole process of reading in general and why certain texts work this way and others don't.
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Date: 2009-03-29 08:34 pm (UTC)Not to give myself too much credit, but I didn't do that. Well, OK, there was the time I tried to argue that Goneril and Regan had reasons for the way they acted in King Lear, but that was about exploring the argument. As I mentioned on my journal, I was big on structure, yes, and at my best, I exceled at being able to dig into a text and find meaning and evidence to support it. I approached literary criticism as science... if there wasn't evidence, I didn't go there. But I often saw others that just went all over the place, and it's one reason I left grad school, because things just had the potential to get silly silly silly!
I agree that labeling someone as misunderstood is a really cheap way to argue a point and I see why you pounced on it. Note that I'm not in anyway trying to continue the debate... I'm done for now and may come back after I've read things through again. I think what I was trying to get at is that I was sensing that Jon was *written* to be misunderstood. It's just that there were points, particularly that whole sequence between Dan and Laurie where we see Jon getting ready for the interview, where what was being said about him wasn't syncing for me with what I was seeing in the panels. And that commentary made me think that some of the dismissal of him as dispassionate and disconnected by the other characters (especially Laurie) was something Moore wanted us to examine. Particularly in light of the trajectory of Chapter IV.
But yeah, this has all really got me thinking about the way I read and the whole process of reading in general and why certain texts work this way and others don't.