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Three viewers viewing: A viewer-response symposium on Jacob's Ladder

1998; Salisbury University; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

0090-4260

Robert D. Craig, Ken Jurkiewicz, Carrol L. Fry,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

charming poem titled In Neolithic Age, Rudyard Kipling tells an earlier incarnation in which he served tribal bard. When critics carped, he stripped them scalp from skull, threaded their teeth neatly on thong, wiped his mouth, and said: is well that they are dead, For know my work is and theirs is wrong. But during the night, his totem visits our stone-age poet and lectures him sternly about the creative process. There are nine and sixty ways, warns the Neolithic muse, of writing tribal lays,lAnd every single one them is right (Works 12:278)! Contemporary critics are unlikely to suffer the fate their unfortunate forebear in Kipling's poem. But those who insist on their reading work the one might be visited by totem for the tribe critics, who would likely intone in solemn majesty, There are nine and sixty ways reading tribal lays, and every single one them is right! The appropriateness this revision Kipling's poem to modern criticism came to us about year ago from this writing when we met at conference to present papers on the same panel. During long afternoon and evening discussing films we'd recently seen, Carrol Fry raised the topic Jacob's Ladder, 1990 film scripted by Bruce Joel Rubin and directed by Adrian Lyne. I really loved that film, he said. It fits into the research on new religious movements I've been doing. Actually, it's much Christian anything, but it's sure New-Age vision Christianity. As might be imagined, much more followed. Well, don't know about that, said Rob Craig, when he could finally capture the floor. religious movements aren't my bag. But couldn't help noticing the psychological appeal in this flick. Did you get the Freudian spin Lyne put on the two Jakes-the one with Jezzy and the one with Sarah? And I'll bet you could really do something with Norman Holland's identity theme or self-reflexivity notions. You guys have this movie all wrong, responded Ken Jurkiewicz, when he could interrupt Rob. about the city and the rottenness life there, and alienation. It's kind like Ghost; Lyne and Rubin are pitching to an urban yuppie audience which recognizes the awfulness life in the city and despair changing it. It's New Age opiate. And much more, from all three us. But before we left the conference, we had recognized that our conversation had made an excellent case for reader-response criticism. We had each seen different film because we had interacted with it differently. The fact that we three had viewed rather than read didn't seem to make much difference. So we determined to put our viewings on paper an example reader-response criticism brought to the film medium. the following divisions, each us employs different mode what we will call viewer-response methodology. The Viewer and the Film Unlike so many recent critical schools thought, reader-response criticism offers the virtue simplicity. is based on few central principles, from which critics have branched out to apply their individual specialties. As an opening assumption, reader-response critics say that we were all wrong in graduate school, at least those us who go back few years, to speak the though it were much part the great scheme the law gravity. The Verbal Icon, Wimsatt and Beardsley define the affective fallacy a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does). This sort thinking, the authors explain, leads to impressionism and relativism, with the outcome being that the poem as an object specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear (21). Their definition earned Wimsatt and Beardsley exactly the sort literary immortality we all try to avoid: that an oft-quoted horrible example. But to do them justice, brief perusal any dictionary critical terms written before 1975 will confirm that they simply repeated the conventional wisdom the profession. …