rthstewart | the shadow the original content creator casts

So, I was going to post something exploring

raykel's discussion earlier about adults playing with toys that are really intended for children. But before we do that,

knitress wrote the following:

As someone who just stumbled into this, the whole ur doing it wrong thing seems very parallel to some of the debates in Lewis scholarship/'scholarship'/worship. Joy Gresham, Mrs. Moore, Lewis' lifelong friend Arthur Greeves.
I mean, if you're going to go on at huge length about what the original author would have wanted, shouldn't you, y'know, learn something about his actual life?

lady_songsmith and

andi_horton have both said, oh yes, please share your reading list!

And so

knitress has said she will post her reading list. This is an interesting exercise in a couple of respects.

There are a lot of people in the Narnia fandom who assert that adhering to Lewis' intent is very important, so illuminating what Lewis did intend and separating that from what others think he intended is interesting. I know some of you know far more about Lewis' life and art than I do, so do share, if you are so inclined.
Stepping back a few meters, some folks really like this sort of exercise at the more philosophical level -- who if anyone has the right to interpret something once it is freed into the wilds. Assuming we do understand the author and what he or she intended, what modicum of respect is owed the original creator? Or his or her designee or progeny? Gresham named Ramandu's Daughter Liliandil for the DT film. Rowling asked once that people not include underage sexual content in HP fic? Does any of that mean anything? Should it?
Last, there is the frustration all authors feel when the reader doesn't get what you intended. Sometimes it's a flaw in the writing; sometimes though it probably doesn't matter how clear you are, right? The reader is going to take what the reader is going to take.

In response to the above, divining authorial intent isn't something I usually worry about. I take a plain language view to borrow from a canon of statutory construction -- if it's there on the page, literally or thematically, it's fair game. I'm more interested in exploring what I and others think about their work, and the community that develops around that exploration then I am in understanding more of what the author thought about his or her work. People pull more than I intended out of my work all the time and frequently I have no greater intent than "Shiny! let's try that!" and "Gosh I love that line. Let me build 10,000 words to include it." Or, "fandom poke. poke. poke."

Admittedly, TSG Peter and I both share extreme ineptitude in the areas of philosophy, theology, and languages. Being a shallow sort, I do not usually ask the big questions. (Though when I told Clio that, she said that I may assert the absence of a rear view mirror and claim inability to think big thoughts but that's because I pour my philosophical musings into fic.) I decline to speculate as that would call for introspection.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I apologize for having to rush out this morning - the train won't wait for me. :-) I felt ham-fisted and thick all day long, though, having not addressed what was obvious the moment I was on my way to the station, which is your (Doctor Dolly's) anxiety that the historical narrative which you've just sent to the publisher is, in some way, inadequate and that way because of the perfidy of a historian somewhere along the line.

I can't speak to your specific situation, without knowing which sources you used and why you used them, and this may not be the place to go into all that. If you'd like to explore your particular case more, though, I'd be happy to.

I'm also not sure that I was adequately lucid in my original comment, as well. My statement "I suspect that historical details may be occasionally omitted in the interests of a good narrative, but that's my private suspicion." referred to the material I'm reading, not anything I would write.

Specifically, I'm looking at the role of late medieval climate changes in the Protestant Reformation, so I'm looking at a lot of biased material from both sides of the confessional divide, and this is the 20th C historiography (never mind the rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth stuff that was produced in the 16th C). My challenges are in sorting out the writer's biases, and some of them are clearly not nefarious. Some of them I don't have much respect for, in the end.

Whichever, to be able to provide a decent inter-textual analysis, not to mention the Lit Review, I need to recognize each approach. The historians I'm reading would probably, each and every one of them, be able to provide a complete justification for what they chose to select and include in their work. I just find that the confessional differences produce a historical discourse which is so selective that, much like the divide today between some Israelis and some Palestinians, it sometimes doesn't sound like it's addressing the same event.

I'm probably thread hijacking at this point, and I'll beg Ruth's apologies.

That's a very interesting insight about my anxiety, which I readily admit to. Although I suspect that the historical narrative is the best part of the book, I might have redrafted the theory four times, though. I should also add this sat on the shelf for 4 years while I worked in industry and I'm rather humbled to still be relevant after waiting this long to publish.

My comment was intended to be more general. Errors of omission whether deliberate or not are near impossible to sort out. In truth, I am whining about the same thing you're seeing in a different field. How do you ensure that you're accurate as a researcher when the underlying data set is off?

- doctor dolly

For the 16th C religious discourse, by going back to the primary source material. Most of what has been discussed during the 20th C is still available, and some of it is even available on-line now. Edward VI's journal, for example, is a bit of a hoary nutshell for English historians - they've been through it so many times, there's nothing new for most of them. But I went through it and found seven or eight references to the weather, and, along the way, read the thing. Now, when other historians refer to his journal, I have an opinion.

I do rely explicitly on the historical climatologists, and I wouldn't even begin to know if their data is wrong. Some of their research involves counting tree rings and the width of those tree rings, or analyzing ice-core samples from Greenland. They also incorporate documentary sources into their reconstitutions, though, and I'll be covering some of their ground again because I want to use those same sources for my analysis.

I would love to read this when you're done. I still work in climate policy professionally, although as a cap and trade consultant. I teach and publish when I'm not busy running my own business. <>

My dissertation was supposed to be on how business organizations reacted to the threat of the climate change regime, but my original advisor passed away. And the rest is history.

-doctor dolly

Thank you. :-) I'd love to work in climate policy one day.

Just barging in here to note, wow. Two women, in two parts of the world, who meet in a Narnia fan fic author's journal in a discussion that veers (very satisfactorily) from matters of textual interpretation, historiography, and historical versus fictional narrative, to a common bond on the subject of climate change.

I <3 the internet.

PS -- there is no thread jacking here. Digressions? Non sequiturs? teal;deer? No problem. Though I'll draw the line if someone tries to correct citation format.

the shadow the original content creator casts

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