Somebody else, posting about the ongoing imbroglio, mentioned having discovered her last nerve. I now feel kind of similar. One particular card has been played by the defendants so often that I feel a need to defend my profession’s good name.
Let’s be clear about this: “you’re reading it wrong” is not an academic argument.
No scholar of literature in today’s field would ever make that claim, at least not with a straight face; in fact I would not expect even a student of literature who has passed her first lit crit class to make it. Theorists from Barthes to Fish have worked hard for this reward: we’ve all figured out that people make meaning and that at least two people–the writer and the reader–plus all their respective cultural baggage are directly, vitally involved in making the meaning of any written text. “You’re reading it wrong” is, at this point, a nonsensical statement.
This is not to say you don’t still sometimes hear it, even from academics who should know better, because assholes exist everywhere. But when they make it, they make it as a personal mistake, not as a solid academic and theoretically based argument, and they rarely make it to other academics, knowing good and well the instant load of scorn it would buy them.
The statement that is far more often heard, and which may have confused some people, is “the examples you’ve shown are not sufficient to support that interpretation”. In the current case, however, this is also insupportable, as any scholar who took the merest glance at the text in question (or even ithiliana’s notes on it) could tell you. There’s plenty of supporting examples to argue that B&I deploys racial stereotypes in some extremely naive ways and, while it may usefully problematize gender issues, fails to take any matching steps along the axis of race and instead just wears the stereotypes in deeper.
One that people may also have heard is “you’re missing some facts about the concepts you’re trying to argue with/about”, as for example the student who reads “Harrison Bergeron” and submits as a ‘Marxist analysis‘ the claim that the story is Marxist because the political system it pictures is Fascist, just like the USSR. The current imbroglio is not such an example; there are no complex theoretical structures or schools of analysis to misunderstand. There is only a careless use of broadly and commonly recognized visual cues, connecting ‘white’ with ‘normal’ and ‘black’ with ’subjection’ and ‘exoticism’ and ‘blight’. And then there is a lot of refusal to listen when the most injured point out the harm that carelessness does. If anyone is missing some facts, it’s the defendants.
Once more, with feeling: “you’re reading it wrong” is not an academic argument.
What it is is an author’s argument, and specifically the plaint of an immature, self-indulgent author who has not yet figured out how to take any criticism of her/his precious, precious writing. All of fandom has, by now, likely recognized it as such, because we hear it so much from each other. In fact, the defendants have, throughout, acted exactly like a fandom coterie having a flamewar. If anyone needed a demonstration that there is no difference between pro writers and amateur writers, down at the bone, this is surely it.
So let us, please, dispense with any pretense that the defendants can make any pronouncements from the protective height of some ivory tower. They aren’t and they can’t, that has been abundantly demonstrated, and this acafan will thank them to stop soiling the name of her profession in their scramble to avoid the censure their own actions have so richly earned them.
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