Bumble 1/29

Can there ever be an absolute truth? We never know the author’s intent, and the meaning shifts among different perspectives. We had spent the class on Tuesday picking apart a quote about stepping outside the quote and the author and “ordinary critic” having entirely different perspectives on the understanding and appreciation of the work. The best example I can think of with this is when I re-watched a movie that I used to watch as a younger girl. I pulled out the movie Clueless and realized what I had thought the movie was about, what the movie meant to me in 5th grade, was extraordinarily different from what I watched as a 19 year old. Among the differences are words that I did not understand, the values and things that I found important were different, and of course my intertexuality was entirely different. Without any control I found myself thinking about all different things that this movie related too, personal experiences in my life that I had not experienced at that younger age. So, clearly while the text was essentially the same I read te text differently. I looked at what wasn’t said differently, I filled in the gaps as a 19 year old and it was a different experience then as a 10 year old. Also, when I take my baby sisters to the movie theatre I always like to see how they laugh at certain things that I would never assume are funny. We will never know the level of understanding that they have of a film, and they clearly don’t understand the “adult humor” which is inevitably infused into films. The person who wrote down the script and filmed it might see it even differently from how I do, so there can be no definite meaning!