I think a lot of people are fundamentally confused about what literary criticism is.
Some literary criticism is like TVTropes [content warning: will eat your entire afternoon]. TVTropes is trying to understand how stories work. Its strategy is to catalog all the recurring things that happen in stories, from Asian characters wearing conical straw hats to characters in love sharing an umbrella to a love triangle being resolved by the protagonist marrying both of them. Some literary criticism is intended to do a similar thing: for instance, Freytag’s pyramid, which you were probably taught about in elementary school, attempts to explain how most stories are structured. This is useful for writers: if your plot isn’t working and you don’t know what a ‘climax’ is, learning that stories are generally more interesting if they have a point of great tension can help you write better stories.
However, a lot of literary criticism– perhaps most– is not doing that, and if you think it does you will wind up very confused.
Consider Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men, a classic work of queer theory, which argues that much of nineteenth-century literature can be understood as being about homosocial desire and love, often reflected through both men’s putative desire for a female intermediary. If one assumes that the thesis of the book is something like “factually, a lot of nineteenth-century literature is about male-male bonding, and maybe if you put some male-male bonding in your book you should include a female intermediary they can both act like they’re in love with!”, one instantly falls into difficulties.
For instance, there’s the question beloved of high-school students everywhere, which is “did the author actually intend that?” Probably, one assumes, Dickens wasn’t thinking for even one second about the homophobia of empire while he was writing Edwin Drood. Of course, this isn’t a complete disproof: authors were writing rising and falling action for thousands of years before Freytag gave them names; presumably they were not intending to write rising and falling action. But it still feels intuitively that while climaxes, rising action, solving love triangles with polyamory, Asian characters wearing conical straw hats, and so on are all easily identifiable features of various books, the homophobia of empire is not, in fact, an easily identifiable feature of Edwin Drood. In fact, a reader would be perfectly justified to say that there was absolutely no homophobia of empire in Edwin Drood whatsoever.
Books are often assumed to be the product of their authors: the writer puts some words down on the page and the reader sees what they obviously mean and a story happens. The reader does not contribute much beyond basic literacy. But, in fact, the reader plays a huge role in the creative process. Some readers interpret Rorschach from Watchmen as a flawed yet admirable tragic hero who holds to his convictions even in the face of death; some readers interpret him as a Lawful Stupid sociopath who’s proof that moral absolutism cannot deal with the complexities of the real world. Some readers interpret Christian Grey as a sexy, kinky, masculine hero with a tragic past; some readers interpret him as an abuser grooming the naive and easily victimized Anastasia. Some readers interpret the violence against women in Game of Thrones as gratuitously signalling how edgy the writers are; others interpret it as a reflection of what women experience during war under patriarchy. The difference is what you bring to the story: your worldview, your preconceptions, the books you’ve read in the past, whether that one particular character happens to remind you of your horrible abusive ex-boyfriend.
Now, some people feel that their interpretations of texts are objectively correct: by God, Christian Grey really is an abuser, and if you disagree then you are wrong and probably an abuse apologist. But I’m not sure what the ‘real meaning’ of the text even means. If Christian Grey ‘really is’ an abuser, what predictions does that allow us to make? How is anything about the world different if Grey is an abuser, compared to if he isn’t? If the answer is (as seems likely) “nothing”, then it doesn’t really mean much to say that one meaning is objectively correct.
Some people care a lot about authorial intent: if the author intended Grey to be a kinky, sexy, masculine hero, then he is a kinky, sexy, masculine hero, and none of your abuse checklists have anything to say about it. This seems silly, though. Tommy Wiseau appears to interpret The Room as a serious drama; everyone else interprets it as a so-bad-it’s-good comedy. I don’t think that everyone who isn’t Tommy Wiseau is making a mistake.
The Eve Sedgwick kind of literary criticism, I think, is not empiricism: it’s not trying to make predictions about what features stories will have or what characteristics will make readers like stories or whatever. It’s art. It’s a very unusual kind of art that takes other art as its raw material. It’s the task of the reader– interpreting a text, creating a story out of black lines on a page– taken to its highest form. This kind of literary criticism is about making interpretations that are more interesting than most people’s, that make you go “oh! that’s clever!”, that enrich your own rereading of the text and make it more interesting than it previously was. Asking whether or not it’s ‘true’ is like asking whether or not a painting is ‘true’.
Between Men is not TVTropes. It’s not trying to be TVTropes. It’s meta. Does the text actually say that Steve and Bucky are dating? Not really. Does it improve my experience of Civil War to read thousand-word close readings about what exactly Bucky was thinking when he clenched his jaw muscle? You bet your ass.
Of course, this sort of literary criticism should be justified in the text. You cannot say “Hamlet is a Klingon!” without providing some sort of reason in the text of Hamlet for why he ought to be a Klingon– because “Hamlet is a Klingon” is not an interpretation anyone would normally make. You have to lead the reader to be able to see for themselves that Hamlet is a Klingon, to have “wow, this is really something a Klingon would say” wandering across their mind during random scenes– or, for that matter, to see that Steve and Bucky are dating, Tennyson is hella gay, and Edwin Drood involves the homophobia of empire.
John said:
It’s important that critics don’t believe they’re doing one type of criticism while actually doing the other. This gets very difficult and touchy when politics gets involved. If you accidentally imply that there’s a direct relation between some narrative device and an ongoing problem in society, who ISN’T going to read that as an endorsement of the position “writers who use this narrative device are to blame for, or at least are happy about, this ongoing problem in society”? Fridging, I think, is emblematic of this problem – what began as discourse on a specific cheesy stock comic book scene has gradually devolved into a prescriptivist claim that female character death is antifeminist.
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Guy said:
Really? Maybe I’ve just not talked to the people who say that kind of stuff, but I’ve usually encountered fridging as a reference to the cheesy stock comic book scene (and its various typical surrounding issues), or sometimes the fact that it’s usually a woman or a minority being put on ice. I have seen discussions of fridging get perscriptivist, but usually it’s in the form of “Have you tried making the reader care about the character before you kill them?” rather than “female character death is antifeminist”. (I’ve also occasionally seen “Maybe try killing a character who matters next time and the audience will actually care.”)
Not to undercut your larger point, I just don’t think I’ve seen the perscriptivist thing happen with fridging specifically.
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John said:
In my experience, the common thread in fridging accusations is “female character death”; the original complaint rarely applies. The two fridging accusations that most stand out in my mind were, respectively:
A) the death of a very well-developed lead character at the climax of a movie, written such that literally anything other than their dying would radically change the entire emotional thrust of the movie
B) the only female death in a horror movie franchise with a body count of something like two dozen per movie, not treated particularly differently from any of the other similar deaths
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Guy said:
Huh. I haven’t seen that before. Out of curiosity, what was the first movie? (Sounds like it might be a good one)
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John said:
A) is describing two movies in the same situation (which actually have a lot of similarities besides just that, but that’s another post): Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and Little Shop Of Horrors. If you see the latter, make sure it’s the director’s cut.
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Guy said:
You know, now that you mention it, I do remember that line of discussion happening around Dr Horrible.
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Shannah said:
I wanted to major in English because I thought there would be a bunch of classes from the TV tropes school of thought. Now I’m trying to figure out what other major I want instead because it’s all the Between Men type stuff.
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taradinoc said:
So, it’s fanfic for academics.
I get the impression that it’s taken more seriously than other fanfic: that imagining a world where Edwin Drood is about homophobia is something one can build a respectable career out of, while imaging a world where Steve and Bucky are dating is not. Is that accurate? If so, why?
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ozymandias said:
It’s not fanfic, it’s meta. It’s not fiction, it’s essays.
I am not sure why the state has chosen to subsidize the creation of one particular form of art that is inaccessible to most people who might want to look at it (because it’s in journals).
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taradinoc said:
Hmm. Maybe I’m using the word “fanfic” too broadly. What’s the thing called where people write Tumblr posts explaining their headcanons?
Here are some possible distinctions between those posts and this sort of criticism:
– the authors’ credentials
– the “greatness” of the interpretations being explained (as in “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people”): Tumblr is more likely to do “what if Batman is autistic” than “what if The Dark Knight Returns is a statement about society’s treatment of autism”
– the degree to which they present themselves as revelations of some inherent truth in the subject works, rather than artistic works reflecting only the author’s imagination
The last seems kind of worrisome, for the reasons John pointed out above.
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ozymandias said:
It’s called ‘meta’. Meta and fanfiction are different. Meta is being a reader; fanfiction is being an author.
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taradinoc said:
Aren’t they both about being authors? The person who writes an essay about why Batman and Robin are probably boning, and the person who writes a story about the time Batman and Robin boned, both invent a fictional narrative inspired by someone else’s work and then establish it through their own writing.
One of them writes a straightforward narrative, and the other writes an argument that their narrative was actually in the original work all along. But the latter is still just their way of telling a story, not an earnest attempt to persuade anyone that the original authors have been hiding Batman and Robin’s sexuality, right?
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Patrick said:
In fanfic you say, “let’s pretend Batman and Robin are a same sex couple” and then tag your story with a long list of acronyms. Your story will then be read by thousands of people hungry for hot Batman on Robin action.
In literary criticism you declare that Batman and Robins relationship reveals the underlying nature of the attitudes towards same sex couples among the society which produced the work, and publish in a journal popularly known by a long list of acronyms. Your story will then be read by no one.
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MugaSofer said:
>I am not sure why the state has chosen to subsidize the creation of one particular form of art that is inaccessible to most people who might want to look at it (because it’s in journals).
…maybe because it claims not be a form of art, but a real and important field of study that yields real results?
It’s kind of like the SCP foundation was backed by the CIA, and occasionally people were actually killed.
>meta
Isn’t the usual term “fandom”, as in “curative vs transformative fandom”?
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Anaxagoras said:
@MugaSofer: As someone who writes for SCP, that would be totally sweet.
Going the other direction, should that sort of thing be taken more seriously? If we sunk as much effort into constructing elaborate hypothetical containment procedures as English professors do with their criticism, would it be reasonable for the CIA to actually adapt relevant bits? After all, the army hired SF writers in WWII to concoct plans against the Axis. (Not sure if I actually endorse this view, but it’s fun to argue for.)
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Murphy said:
Not so much fanfic as fantheories:
Type you get paid no money for: “Movie A and Movie B are secretly in the same world because of that prop they re-used.”
Type you can get a professor job doing: “Character from Movie A and Character from Movie B are secretly gay and a couple (because they used the same apartment set for both their homes)”
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Idomeneus said:
This is a good post on an under-discussed topic. It reminds me of an Oscar Wilde quote:
“That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind. I am always amused by the silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate work. ”
Though I don’t think the line between TVTropes style and Between Men style crticism is as absolute as you imply.
And I think it’s worth emphasizing that even though many of these opinions are subjective (Hamlet is a Klingon), some subjective opinions are better than others. And standing by your subjective opinion as the one most supported by facts and your moral principles is basically what truth is.
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Tricky said:
I think a way to measure “some subjective opinions [as being] better than others” could involve the extent to which one interpretation is also felt by others. People tend to think of an interpretation as good if they believe it too, or if they recognize that the interpretation is common.
That said, if your goal is to use person x’s interpretation of media to shed light on person x, then any subjective opinion is useful.
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Patrick said:
I think you’re pretty much correct here.
I also think that people’s confusion is understandable. Literary critics rarely admit that their “interpretations” of texts are more akin to creative impositions. And the politically motivated literary critics make free use of the tools of the flight of fancy variety while aggressively denying that their interpretations aren’t “true” in any meaningful sense other than that they’re elaborating on one particular way someone might choose to interpret a text if they really try.
This is a rare place where a legal education is actually very useful. Law involves the interpretation of text. All the usual rules about how a text is interpreted apply to statutes as much as to fiction. But the legal context generally forces you to be much more explicit as to what you’re doing and why. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than anything I’ve ever encountered in literary criticism circles, which as far as I can tell are a hive of scum and villainy in which eliding between interpretive structures in order to make political points and display ones cleverness are art forms. Legal reasoning, for all it’s frustrating aspects (it’s mostly frustrating because we want statutes to have objective meaning and political legitimacy, and our criteria for those things are varied, contentious, and contradictory, leaving is wanting something that is often impossible but to which we can usually at least approximate), has a groundedness that I quite appreciate.
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ozymandias said:
My post is standard reader-response criticism which is extremely mainstream. It seems you object to New Criticism, which fortunately for you hasn’t been dominant in the academy since the 1970s.
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Fisher said:
The good thing about classical analysis, formal analysis, and even feminist and marxist analyses is that they have internal limiting factors. Reader response analysis seems like an excuse for axe-grinding.
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Patrick said:
My objections apply to feminist literary criticism, post colonial literary criticism, and more. All of which are within the broadly defined umbrella of reader response, and none of which are as dead as they should be.*
Though they are admittedly non central examples of reader response theories, and maybe shouldn’t be counted. There’s a material difference between seeking to understand the actual response of readers, versus making bold declarations of how readers in “our patriarchal culture” necessarily interpret a text, even if those pesky readers disagree. I’ll leave it to you whether to count them, but either they count and I intend my response to apply to them, or they don’t count and reader response isn’t as dominant as you’re suggesting.
*To clarify, I think they have every right to exist in a general sense, and my objections to them are mostly situated in my belief that they interpret texts via a mostly false lens of beliefs about the likely responses of readers. When a feminist critic tells me how they interpreted a text, that’s useful and interesting to me as a reader, an amateur writer, and a cultural participant.
When that critic starts telling me what messages the text sent ME or MY CULTURE based on the critics insulting, negative, and in my opinion false expectations as to my thought processes and how those thought processes will interpret a given text, that’s anti intellectual and offensive and as far as I’m concerned a declaration of hatred, bigotry, and war for exactly the same reasons that critic would feel the same way if I did that to them.
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Doug S. said:
I think you can find some of this kind of theorizing on the “Wild Mass Guessing” pages on TV Tropes, in addition to the silly theories that are just jokes and the speculation about things that haven’t been written yet.
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AJD said:
“If Christian Grey ‘really is’ an abuser, what predictions does that allow us to make?”
…Well, presumably, it allows us to predict that real people whose partners behave the same way that Christian Grey does are relatively likely to have experienced trauma, to regard themselves as having been abused, etc.
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davidmikesimon said:
Yeah, exactly! Grey is an abuser in the sense that a real person behaving the way he does would be. The argument is Watsonian, not Doylist.
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Tricky said:
First of all — do you happen to have any such thousand-word Stucky Civil War close readings handy? *interested* 😛
Second — I think it’s useful to frame literature in terms of how it has epistemic value. On the one hand its elements are necessarily fictional, and non-fictional pieces can only be recognized as such through comparison to other non-fictional materials — just reading a story doesn’t say much about what is, or can be, real and what isn’t/can’t.
On the other hand, literature can tell readers lots of information about *other readers*. Suppose someone writes a poem that heavily features the image of crisp, white snow. A reader could interpret that poem extremely differently depending on whether they were Japanese, where “white” is a color associated with death, or American, where whiteness is associated with purity and traditional wedding dresses.
Taken further, literature often serves as a useful personal psychoanalytical tool. The epistemic value of literature, then, is learning about one’s own values through hypothetical situations kindly crafted by another author.
And that’s leaving aside the point that literature, writing or reading, can be a useful tool for practicing empathy and for modelling others’ behavior and feelings. Autobiographies and real people might depict real memories and situations, but while literature allows a reader to experience a story alongside, and sometimes from within, a viewpoint character, more non-fictional sources tend to summarize broad stretches of time from the perspective of having lived through it already.
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Immanentizing Eschatons said:
A minor nitpick, and I’ve never read the book in question, but is the argument over whether Christian Grey is an abuser or not over whether the actions they take explicitly in the story are abusive, or are people guessing they do abusive things beyond things they are said to do in the text?
Because if its the former it sounds like a moral judgement, which can’t really be expected to predict anything anymore than it can in real life.
(“Bad things are portrayed as good things” can be seen as an entirely different sort of criticism of fiction, I guess)
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Patrick said:
The former, coupled with a dispute over whether the typical reader who enjoys dubious consent fiction does so because they suspend disbelief in their moral principles, or because they fail to recognize the events depicted as morally wrong.
Fifty Shades is a particular flashpoint because it describes fictional people engaged in fictional BDSM. BDSM includes but is not limited to a protocol for real life people to engage in consensual non or dubious consent fantasies (that’s why it has safe words other than “stop”). That means the story utilizes the trappings of imaginary non or dubious consent to tell a story about imaginary actual dubious consent.
This analogy isn’t perfect, but… imagine a story about LARPers who get attacked by actual zombies and kill them with their foam core weapons, which apparently include actual working firearms and edged weaponry. Is that a fun story about the fantasy of LARPing taken to a silly but enjoyable extreme? Or a story designed to go to ridiculous lengths to make irresponsible LARPing seem cool? At a certain point the levels of abstraction make your head spin.
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Lambert said:
From what I’ve heard, safewords are ignored in the text, so it is a defensible position that Grey is an abuser. Of course, 50 Shades takes place in that most common of fantasy settings: a world indistinguishable from ours except how everything inexplicably seems to turn out for the best.
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rash92 said:
If i understand this right, i think what made it click for meis applying this to music. Take R.E.Ms losing my religion for example. I know that ‘losing my religion’ has a meaning that doesn’t actually have anything to do with losing your religion, although i didn’t know that when i first heard the song. That song has more meaning to me if it’s about literally losing your religion, and when i listen to it, even though i know the author didn’t intend it to be literal, i think of it as being literal as that has more meaning to me. That’s the most explicit one i can think of, but there are plenty more more subtle ones where the songwriter almost definitely didn’t mean something in the way i interpret it, and even though i know this i still think of my own interpretation when i listen to it.
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MugaSofer said:
If someone writes a really good science fiction story about aliens, we don’t call them a xenobiologist.
Crazy fan theories are one of my favourite forms of entertainment. I don’t mean that flippantly; arguing over whether the Empire from Star Wars is *really* the bad guy or whether the Jedi were morally justified in forbidding love or Droids represent a realistic depiction of overlooked slavery by otherwise good protagonists or whatever is legitimately one of my favourite pastimes. I even hold reasonably strong opinions about these things – but they’re not real. They’re analogous to my favourite character to play in a videogame; it’s only the “correct” choice in the sense that it’s fun to play and maybe lends itself to the rules of the game.
I read a lot of fan theories and musings on fiction. Some of it approaches genuine brilliance; some is utter drivel, like any art form.
But when a painter starts arguing that he’s seeing the real soul of things because reality is subjective, and demanding we pay more attention to him than photographs of the thing, then that painter is a twit.
Literature criticism of this form is not an academic discipline. It’s entertainment, and should be treated to the standards of such.
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sniffnoy said:
Basically agree; Ghatanathoah’s comment below is good too.
It’s interesting to think about what might be considered an “academic discipline” if we were starting from scratch. How about, say, speedrunning? 😛 It seems to much more resemble how an academic discipline should work than this sort of literary criticism does!
(No, I don’t actually think speedrunning should be an academic discipline, because the problems it solves are blatantly artificial. God created the integers; The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the work of man.)
(OTOH, if you consider what Ozy has said elsewhere about how education should work, perhaps it should be! But if you go down that rabbit hole, the boundaries become unclear really fast…)
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Ghatanathoah said:
I remember doing a lot of literary criticism in College that seemed to be about non-subjective things, and which seemed to make actual real-world predictions.
For instance, I once wrote a report about “Dracula” and “The War of the Worlds” with a fairly standard interpretation that they were examples of “invasion literature.” I think my interpretation made several predictions, which are difficult, but not impossible to test, such as:
1. British people in the 1890s were worried about getting invaded, in the same way modern Americans are worried about terrorism.
2. One of the reasons “Dracula” and “War of the Worlds” were successful was that they spoke to this worry.
3. Stoker and Wells were responding to this worry when writing the books, either consciously or subsconsciously.
Similarly, if I understand what you are saying about “Between Men,” it is essentially predicting that:
1. Men in the Victorian era longed to be close to other men, but were afraid people would think they were gay, so they used women as intermediaries.
2. The success of Dicken’s work was partly due to it speaking to these urges.
3. Dickens had such urges himself, or knew people who did, and that is why his books speak to them.
This sort of literary criticism isn’t a wordy academic explanation of people’s headcanon. It’s actually doing sociology and psychology on some level as well. It is making predictions, although they are ones that are hard to rigorously test without sending a bunch of sociologists back in time to do surveys.
I wonder if perhaps academics do a poor job of delineating “academic headcanon” criticism from “sociology through literature” criticism, and that is why people confuse them.
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sniffnoy said:
I think the first question is, do the academics involved recognize that there’s a distinction?
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Subbak said:
Okay, I might be missing something here but how are any of those predictions? They’re clearly about the past (which is not always a disqualifying factor, but here it does sound like the person making the “prediction” already knew (or believed) it was true beforehand), and furthermore 2 and 3 are not even things you can test easily (as opposed to, say, something for which you can go through public records of the time).
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Maxim Kovalev said:
I’m not sure what this makes me think about the validity queer theory. Like the part where Objectivism is based on a novel with cheesy love stories doesn’t elevate my opinion on it. And here we have basically a description of a headcanon being in a status of a classic work in something that claims to be a scientific theory?
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Anna said:
I like this essay– I think it makes some good points and distinctions. The only thing that made me double take was…did people really see The Room and come away with a comedy??? Were we watching the same movie? (after wiki-ing, I’ve determined we in fact were NOT watching the same movie. 2015 movie has no relation to the 2003 film mentioned in the article).
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Guy said:
Did nobody think about this when they made the movie? (They could have just called it “Trapped” or something…)
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davidmikesimon said:
One movie is called “The Room”, the other is just called “Room”.
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Anonymous said:
So lit crit is like that theory that Sans is actually Ness?
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