I wouldn't have used "bad", myself, because there are reviews that are as inept as the lousiest of books and I want to reserve "bad" for them. I'd have used "negative". Although I guess inept might do.
Bad reviews are a basic fact of literary life, you might have thought. There are so many different kinds of literary taste, that no book can be all things to all readers. One person’s comfort reading is another’s trash, and what’s thought-provoking to one is high-faluting nonsense to another. But the essential subjectivity of taste is hard to keep in mind when it’s your favourite book that’s getting a pasting: what seemed to the reviewer to be a careful and evidence-based summary of the book’s failing, seems to you to be an attack on your taste, your culture, and your personality. To criticize something you like is tantamount to criticizing you, and that’s personal, damn it!
It’s this reaction, I think, that explains why responses to bad reviews so often take the form of personal attacks on the reviewer. In fact, there’s such a standard playbook of responses, that you can play along at home:
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are 
comment(s); comment here or there.
james_nicoll
2012-01-30 03:48 pm (UTC)
I believe she "came out", as it were, in 1859, after the publication of Adam Bede and before Middlemarch. But your point is well-taken in general: it's impossible for me to forget everything I know in order to interpret a text totally free from bias.
However, just because I am biased doesn't mean I'm wrong: you still need an actual argument to that effect. (Of course, if you know or suspect the source of my bias, that might make my mistakes for you easier to spot.)
Edited at 2012-01-30 04:14 pm (UTC)
2012-01-30 06:54 pm (UTC)
This sounds right. I was nosing around on Google Books and found the Blackwood review of Middlemarch, where the author in question is referred to repeatedly in the feminine gender ("her earlier efforts" etc).
But gender perception still plays a role. "George Eliot" was a serious writer, not a "lady novelist" who wrote "silly novels". This notion that a serious author is one who "writes like a man" took a lot of killing (and may not be entirely dead).
Gender perception in literature
2012-01-31 08:56 am (UTC)
In fact, I'd say that the notion (which is also alive and kicking) is not that a serious author is one who "writes like a man" but that a woman cannot write like a man and therefore is, by definition, not to be taken seriously.
It is (thanks to the remnants of the Tolkien/Lewis syllabus which stopped literature studied in the Oxford undergraduate English Literature course at works published before 1832, and which still has a strong hold though not quite the stranglehold it used to have) pretty much possible to acquire a first class degree in English literature from Oxford without having to read *one* book written by a woman; certainly no twentieth century works written by woman.
Our host here frequently alludes to the question of women being excluded from anthologies and so forth in the SFF field and to the vexed question of whether fiction with dragons in is automatically fantasy not SF (answer; depends on the gender of the author, largely) and then we have the execrable Andrew Davies adaptation of South Riding where the author's complex study of provincial life and the impact of local government on society between the Wars was reduced to a cross-class love story because Davies clearly thought that the most important aspect of any text was the author's name on the front and if that name suggested a female author then what she must have written must have been a love story irrespective of the strong textual evidence to the contrary.
Edited at 2012-01-31 10:29 am (UTC)
2012-01-31 11:43 am (UTC)
My point is simply that it is unhelpful to pretend that what is being analysed in any case is purely the text: it's always the text+what the reader knows or surmises about the author of the text so the "the author is dead" formulation is nothing more than a statement about which types of extrinsic evidence it is permissible to bring to bear on a piece of writing. It's a distinction which becomes increasingly artificial the more the reader in fact knows about the author in question. After all, how often does one hear someone say about an author words to the effect, "And once I heard about the tentpeg thing I could never read her books in the same way again" or its equivalents?
2012-01-31 02:23 pm (UTC)
I think we're at cross-purposes here. What I have been talking about is "arguments" or "claims" about texts (the kinds of claims that get made by critics or reviewers). I agree with you that interpretation is subjective, but interpretation rests upon claims about texts that can be true or false (in some cases), or well or poorly supported (in others).
Claims range from the highly objective ("there are no occurrences of the letter e in the text of La Disparition") to the highly subjective ("the unifying theme of Middlemarch is marital compatibility"). But even highly subjective claims are open to confirmation or dispute via evidence from the text.
Of course you're right that "evidence from the text" is not unproblematic—someone has to read the text to figure out what it says, and this brings in their preconceptions and knowledge from outside the text. Thus there's a continuum between structuralism and reader-response theory.
"the author is dead" formulation is nothing more than a statement about which types of extrinsic evidence it is permissible to bring to bear on a piece of writing
I see it as a principle as to what kinds of evidence relate to what kind of claim: in particular, that claims about the text need to be grounded or refuted based on evidence from the text.
"And once I heard about the tentpeg thing I could never read her books in the same way again"
Sure. So what I'm saying is that if you then went on to make a claim like "impression is a metaphor for the dragonrider's sexual orientation becoming fixed" you'd still need to back it up from the text: appealing to the author's views is not by itself persuasive.
2012-01-31 03:10 pm (UTC)
*To which I am, to be fair, usually minded to comment, "What's Leaf by Niggle then, chopped liver?"
Edited at 2012-01-31 03:26 pm (UTC)
2012-01-31 03:32 pm (UTC)
I'm not sure this is the best of examples. "Attempt to cash in" seems to be a claim about the motivation of the film-makers, not a claim about the text. But let's say that you revise the claim to something like "the Two Towers are metaphors for the Twin Towers".
I could produce a beautiful text-based argument
If you could, then I'd agree that neither biographical data nor authorial intent would refute it.
Edited at 2012-01-31 03:34 pm (UTC)
2012-01-31 04:21 pm (UTC)
I disagree both with your characterisation of what was said and with your reformulation of it. You made it clear in your credo (in a point with which I fundamentally disagree but haven't got around to tackling yet) that
There is an ethical position that it is morally wrong to use the interest generated by real world tragedies especially in the immediate aftermath to produce media products linked whether overtly or covertly on those tragedies in the hope that the interest in the underlying tragedy will bring them to a wider audience than they would achieve absent such linkage. I do not state whether I agree or disagree with that position but state that it exists. Those who held such an ethical position complained that based on the textual evidence viz the title of Jackson's film that was what they surmised the implied author of the film was engaged in doing. Why is that not a claim about the text?
2012-01-31 05:08 pm (UTC)
Because it mixes levels of description. The implied author, being a fictional character, isn't in a position to bring the film to a real-world audience.
I'm hesitant to attempt another reformulation since you objected to my first attempt, but "the implied author of the film was the sort of person who would use the interest generated by real world tragedies to bring their film to a wider audience" is a claim that I would accept as being about the text.
Do we disagree about what it means for a claim to be "about the text"?
2012-01-31 05:26 pm (UTC)
I'll accept that, yes. I think the narrowing of your position on when things are about the text and when they are not gives you more problems when it comes to the points about ethical and moral problems, but it doesn't give me any real difficulties for the current position, since the real issue is that people claimed that the title "The Two Towers" was a reference to the WTC tragedy and therefore disapproved of the title. Which is clearly a claim about the text, and the additional issues about anyone's presumed motivations for choosing that title can safely be parked, for now.