20141014.0705

I opted to sleep in a bit today. It did not help as much as could be hoped.

Not long ago, I made a post to the Tales after Tolkien Society blog, Travels in Genre and Medievalism, that treats a piece in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I have discussed my reading the magazine before (here and here, if not elsewhere), and it was a pleasure to be able to deploy it in a more formal sense than has usually been the case for me. It was also a pleasure to hear from the author of the piece, who evidently found mention of himself and his work and decided to follow up on it. The author joins the author of another piece, an RPG I discussed with my classes as noted here. As in the fantasy author's case, I received an email from the writer following up on the reception of the work, and I was happy to have it.

There is a certain flattery in both sides of the exchange. I am in print in a few places (here, here, here, and here, among others), and I have heard myself cited in the academic work of other scholars, which is immensely gratifying. As such I confess to sharing the impulse to contact those who deploy what I have done to get their opinions of what I have done. And I confess also to being gratified to have attracted the attention of authors with my comments about their work; I have to think that the direct and personal response to criticism and scholarship is something that does not happen often. I do not think I have heard many others speak of it--although I admit that it could well be an artifact of most of my colleagues working with writings by those already dead. (Shakespeare returning to comment on the hitherto undiscovered country would not be so happy an experience, I think.)

How to handle the interaction is not entirely clear. I have not yet been confronted by an author seeking to silence me, to say that I cannot conduct scholarly inquiry into the author's work, yet I have to consider how I would handle such a request. I do not think I would be under a legal obligation to accede to the request (Fair Use doctrine and all that), but I do not know what the ethical action would be, to cease or to persist. Nor do I know, necessarily, how to address critiques of my critiques by authors whose works I do or might treat. The ideas of Foucault's death of the author and Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy come to mind as reasons to set them aside, but the author is the sole witness to the process of composition and so retains a particular authority even if it must be admitted that more happens in the writing than the author necessarily realizes. It remains a fraught issue--although, again, I am happy to have to negotiate it. Doing so suggests that I am making some headway in my scholarly work.