This reminds me of the Radio Times article that revealed how Peter Capaldi (the Doctor), Steven Moffat (head writer and executive producer), and Mark Gatiss (writer of several episodes) fared on a Doctor Who pub quiz.
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You’ll shoot your eye out…
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I don’t think the death of the author is mandatory.
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My first thought, too!
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edit to clarify something: La mort de l’auteur is never mandatory it is simply that using the author to critique a work of art is not a critique of a work but rather a critique of an author’s work. There is a significant difference. Further, the feelings one may experience when viewing the work of Rodin are in no way dependant on the feelings Rodin wished to convey. Mandatory never comes in to it. The way one views art is not about mandatory conditions but rather the impression the work had on the experiencer.
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I went to Public High School in Colorado in a class that I had two teachers (60 students in the class, they had to have 1 teach per X students) The entire year my papers were graded by one teacher. I worked diligently on all of them, and never got better than a C-. The last paper of the year was on Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” and the teacher that graded mine went on vacation, so it was graded by the other. I knew I was going to have to take the class over anyway, but I didn’t want to get grounded for not doing homework, so I read the back of the book and wrote a two page paper. I got an A- with a note from the teach “Why didn’t you do this type of work all year?”
I realized then that the bar for being a teacher was LOW, that most of them aren’t people I should be listening to to prepare me for life.
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I think A-level coursework is still on the same standard as mumble years ago when I did mine. The teacher marks them all according to a mark scheme, and a random sample of the high, medium and low grades are sent for external assessment. If the externals disagree, then all the teacher’s work gets reassessed.
Basically, it’s probably not just this teacher’s opinion, but that of the exam board. Since he’s spoken to the press, I expect this one will be “randomly” selected.
I very quickly learned that the correct interpretation of any work in English Language/Literature GCSE was whatever the exam board said was the correct interpretation. You could get marks for arguing the wrong interpretation, but this is harder, so just learn the right interpretation and spit that out in the exam.
Yes, this applied to work that was internally and externally graded. All this sort of exam goes for external grading.
Students often say that they get a poor grade because the teacher “disagreed with what I have to say.” As a teacher, let me just say I don’t give a shit whether I agree or disagree with a student’s paper. I only care whether they actually argued it well and backed it up with appropriate evidence. "My dad said . . . " is not appropriate evidence, even if your dad is the author of the work.
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If all interpretations are correct, then surely consensus ones are not more correct than others.
Unless you are arguing that 50 Shades of Grey is one of the great literary works of all time.
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The idea that this difference is significant holds sway with some people, not me.
We may agree that a work must stand on it’s own, that the author having written the text has also surrendered the text to interpretation and that the reader ultimately gives the text meaning. But then so does Barthes, and his intent meaningless, I see no way to accept that the author’s intent is irrelevant if it’s the only reason the text exists in the first place.
Does knowing Rodin’s intent ruin the experience of viewing Rodin? It can only inform it.
Glad to see were violently agreeing with one another here.
My argument is that just as our understanding of the symbols used in a text are our own, so too does the author’s intent become something we can draw upon and therefore does not become the reading of the text, otherwise knowing the author’s intent must then ruin something basic about our interpretation of their work.
Then again, I don’t think it was fair (for the original post) to (implicitly) insult McEwan’s tutoring ability.
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Perhaps. But one is a teacher and one is a novelist (a good one of whom I’m a fan). I’d give the teacher more of the benefit of the doubt in their own field. That said, you make a good point that the OP made the opposite implication without explaining why.
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I read one book by McEwan. I couldn’t stand it. Middle class British write-by-the-numbers. It was unforgiveable.
I will not bother with another.
Hence, I’m unsurprised at this outcome.
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The fact that 50 Shades is puerile dribble doesn’t mean it’s not also a great literary work. Shakespeare’s plays were the lowest-common-denominator trash entertainment of their era.
“By my life, 'tis my lady’s hand! Her Cs, her Us and her Ts, and thus she makes her great Ps!”
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I’ve read a couple, gotta say that I agree, very middlebrow stuff.
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Was it Saturday, by any chance? Really bad book. Really bad. Enduring Love is great though.
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That’s one that I read, awful indeed. I thought On Chesil Beach was better, but not by much – very schematic plot.
I know you werent replying to me, but thanks, maybe I’ll try Enduring Love.
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An anecdote reported by Isaac Asimov is that he went to a conference and one of the speakers started talking about one of his stories (I believe it was Nightfall). At the end of the talk, Asimov stood up and said that he was completely wrong regarding the story meaning, the guy asked how he could be so confident and Asimov said “because I’m the author of the story”, and the other guy, without skipping a beat, replied: “The fact that you are the author doesn’t mean that you know what the story is about”. Asimov noted that they became friends after the exchange.
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This is the difference between the value of personal interpretation which provides to the interpreter and learned interpretation upon which a student may be graded. The former is as valid or even more so as the later when experiencing art for arts sake but the later is more valid when evaluating a students grasp of material taught.
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People who actually worked on the show vs trufans? Heh. Who could have predicted that? 
