Should we privilege the author or the work?

Should we privilege the author or the work?

depends on whether they're liberal or not

Yes, but not infinitely.

your own interpretation.

I hate that weird inflection he does at the end of his sentences sometimes

You've watched enough of his stuff to notice a specific inflection?
U r a fag dude!

Over OP, maybe

I've watched some of his history videos. Not bad, really. Whenever he blew up properly a few years ago as a writer I was pretty shocked, because I only knew him as a youtuber. Pretty weird as he was a writer before that

you should feel bad for enjoying something I don't

You can believe that the work is fundamentally self-contained and also believe that the creator could have some interesting thoughts about it.

An excerpt from the video he made today examining a Kanye West lyric.

>"Don't tell me that Kanye didn't actually mean this because he's not 'smart' or whatever, authorial intent doesn't matter."

Do you agree?

Crash Course is disgusting.

Why so? I've only watched the ones about India and China. For what they are they seem alright

What does privilege even mean now?

>authorial intent doesn't matter
nah

How do they even make this argument? What's the point of even analysing a text if you're just projecting yourself into the words like a fucking rorschach blot?

It's such a shitty way to learn anything.
Watch a documentary... it has an atmosphere.
It will immerse you in what you are learning.
Crash Course is like having a spastic 12 year old read Wikipedia as fast as he can while making snarky jokes about it. How you treat the material matters as much as the material itself, imho. Why would you want to learn about 5,000 year old civilizations in 10 minutes? What have you gained? Do you really think you'll retain that information? It's disrespectful to those cultures and it's disrespectful to your self!

People aren't interested in growing up and reading books like adults. They want to escape and be children. That's why YA is so popular. People don't believe that literature will give meaning to their lives. Everybody's trying to be the best bullshit artist they can be, so there's no point in facing reality and learning to understand other people. John Green believes he's relating to black people by handing out statistics, but he's just using data to prop up a victim narrative. He's not proving his sincerity by helping blacks or calling for an end to the war on drugs or the outsourcing of jobs, which have stripped them of their incomes/dignity and destroyed their communities. He's done at least two videos on Syrian refugees, but none in/on an urban ghetto. Let's face it, people are out of touch with reality and they aren't interested in returning from their fantasies any time soon.

I think it makes sense, if you're trying to form an accurate holistic interpretation of a work, to take the author's intent into consideration and, in certain cases, even pay due respect to what the author was attempting.

At no point should authorial intent disqualify meaning, though. It should only ever add substance to your interpretation. Never be a cause for discounting.

if you want to learn history read a book.

Disregarding so casually something like authorial intent, instead of critically approaching it is intellectually poor.

And from reading that excerpt, I take it he thinks what Kanye wrote was deliberate? Then authorial intent matters, does it not?

Either way, Green is a mess.

You should try to figure out what the author did not intend.

Authorial intent is, at the very least, a part of a symptomatic understanding of a work.

>privilege
how about we argue whether privilege exists or not? or whether it means anything?