Max Sawicky wrote: > > (Spoiler alerts) > > It takes a white guy to rescue the natives. > Plus he gets to doodle the native princess. > > Another thought. In reality the natives usually lose, > especially if they lack outside assistance. > What does it mean to pose a fantasy where they win? > > What does it say about the power of the bad guys, > or the agency whereby they could actually be > defeated, ultimately.
The debate, as far as I can tell, makes a false assumption: that a work has an _essence_, and that that essence detrmines the political impact of the work on audiences. I've seen this operate in two specialize domains with which I happen to be extensively acquained: Early 20th-c criticism of the poetry of Pope and mid-century criticism of Milton's Paradise Lost. It became quite obvious in both instances that the "ontological significance" (moral, political, religous, philosophical meaning) was mostly determined by the perspective the critic brought to his/her reading of it. I the huge corpus of commentary on Paradise Lost I read I saw not the least indication that anyone's understanding of the world had been changed by that reading. Actually, I think the Kautsky/Lenin understanding of agitation and propaganda is relevant here. Agitation is only effective as it appeals to the reader/listner's own experience. It has to elicit a "Hey! that's right" response. And propaganda assumes a reader in pretty complete agreement with the propagandist who reads it in order to deepen and sharpen a perspective he/she already conciously holds. The same point, come to think of it, is in abilical incident that I don't recall very well, the parable of planting seed on fertile or infertile groudn. So both sides are almost certrainly correct in this debate. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
