Intention verses Interpretation

[microsoft!stevesc@uunet.uu.net]

This note got eaten by my computer a while ago, and I didn't know it
was still on the machine so I could try it again.  Here goes...

I have an amusing story about intention verses interpretation, dating
back to my Freshman Honors English class.

All through the semester I had been writing my honest interpretations
of the books and the authors' intentions.  I was getting mainly B and
C grades (I hope those terms don't confuse non-U.S. readers), even
though I was writing fairly well in both content and writing quality.

I got tired of those kind of grades, and decided to try an experiment
(not #4).  The professor often highlighted Biblical (mainly Christian)
and Freudian interpretations of the books we studied, some of which
were probably intended, but many of which I found very questionable.  My
experiment was to try to apply those type of interpretations to a book
which I saw no such interpretations, and believed the author had no such
intentions either.

The book we were reading at the time was _Being There_, by Jerzy
Kozinski (I may well be misspelling his name), which was also adapted
into a great Peter Sellers movie.  First I read the book with the
primary intention of enjoying it, and the secondary intention of
keeping up with discussions of it in class, rather than the literature
student's usual intention of interpreting a book.  Later I simply paged
through it at random, and read from the point that I opened the book
until I came across something that I could warp into either a reference
to the Bible or Freud.  The main theme in my paper were that to Chance
(the main character), television (the book's main theme) was God.  I
forget what my main Freud theme was, but I had a lot of ``evidence''
there too.  I just kept searching for stuff until I had the volume of
material I needed to write a paper of the expected length.  My bogus
evidence was voluminous enough that I almost convinced myself!

The professor received the paper extremely well.  She gave me a heavily
weighted A on it, and used it as one of the examples in discussion.  I
ended up getting a B+ in the class because the paper was the last major
project in the class, weighed heavily in the grade, and showed lots of
``improvement'' over my previous work in the class.

I was proud of the good grades I got from that project.  I was proud
also of figuring out what it took to get good grades in that class.  I
was however somewhat disillusioned to find that honest opinions and my
writing and interpretation ability didn't matter so much as my ability
to write for the intended reader.  Looking back, I value that class
quite highly.  Not because it taught me anything about literature, but
because it taught me an important art in writing, the art of writing
for a specific audience.  Depending on the context, that art can be
either ``readability'' or ``bullshitting''.

I also got a nice story to tell about school from that class.

	Steve Schonberger	microsoft!stevesc@uunet.uu.net
	"Working under pressure is the sugar that we crave"

P.S.  Can anyone identify my signature quotation before I reveal it?

(I've already revealed it to some people.)