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I think the point is that your hypothetical situations sound improbable.
Ludicrous rather than improbable, but essentally yes. Alas is very good about a similar thing when MattShepherd was imagining an academic argument, if I recall correctly. The academic argument being imagined was:
So what happens when two people have different interpretations of something and they disagree? If I have a well-developed theory that Betty and Veronica is a veiled examination of post-industrial alienation, but Joey has a well-developed theory that Betty and Veronica is in fact a subtle overview of non-Euclidean geometry, and we both insist the other's reading is misguided, are we both "bad readers" or "good readers"? I've done more research into post-industrial alienation and have written a 5,000-word essay on the comic in question, but Joey has a PhD in geometry and has analyzed the entire issue pixel by pixel. And we are both stridently denoucning the others' views. We've both done the work, but we're denying the other person the right to their interpretation. Who gets to be "good"?
It gets harder when we move away from things that are more-or-less obviously metaphorical/mutli-layered on the surface, too.
F'rinstance, what if I believe that a two-page bit in Archie #787 where Hot Dog eats the Jones' Thanksgiving turkey because Arch and Jugs are down at the Chok'lit Shoppe scarfing hamburgers is in fact a stunning commentary on the American internment camps of World War II? The author's intent to tell a short funny story about Hot Dog eating the turkey is obviously irrelevant, and anyone who tries to tell me that no, it's really just a gag about a dog that eats a turkey is "bad", yes?
Alas responded:
MattShepherd, I think your point is that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and that's absolutely right--as a lit teacher, I also regularly have to pull students back from leaping into "symbolic readings" that just don't work. And they don't work often for the same reasons that your argument above doesn't really work for me: it's utterly abstract, not grounded in an actual text. Your examples are clearly hypothetical arguments--there is no Joey and you are not making the B&V argument.
Do academics engage in arcane arguments over, ultimately, probably not very relevant issues? Sure, we make jokes about this all the time (a regular catch-phrase in academe is "because the stakes are so low" which is the punch line to a joke: "Why are academic arguments so fierce and poisonous?"). But while, yeah, there's a grain of truth to that--i.e., that one can lose sight of a larger perspective when engaged in heated debates over details--it's also a joke that's regularly and nastily made by outsiders with an anti-intellectual agenda; people who not only don't really understand the way academic argument works (i.e., in your argument with Joey WHY are you putting his argument down? You don't know, because it's a made up argument: i.e., there ARE NO STAKES in your imaginary argument) but they don't WANT it to work at some level. They WANT there to be no there there.
That is basically never true in a fierce academic debate: something IS at stake, and it is usually, in fact, virtually always something important, real, and vital to our human lives on this planet, even if it's "just about comics." But it's a lot easier for people to trivialize others than to understand them.
Likewise, really. These examples have no weight. No heft. They are unreal. |
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