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Writer's pictureTan Sher Lynn

Fiction and Interpretation

1. Interpretive Conventions in Site-Specific and Experimental Art: An analysis of Richard Serra’s Sculptures and Joseph McElroy’s Fictions

“9/11 emerging” - Joseph McElroy (notes)

  • Parallels between Serra’s sculpture and McElroy’s fiction

  • both artists derange our perceptual and interpretive structures







Joseph McElroy

  • interest in the possibility for different, and at times apparently disconnected, parts of our lives to indirectly influence one another

    • “Neural Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts” (1975)

      • writes of connective networks that join seemingly opposite realms in our lives

  • Relationship between abstractions and experience

    • “Socrates on the Beach. Thought and Thing” (2002)

      • explains how the abstract thinking of philosophy and architecture joins the impulses of practical life in his work

    • “Canoe Repair”

      • material endeavor branches into immaterial realms




Discursive Space:


Michel Foucault

  • archeological method focuses on the proliferation of discontinuities in the history of ideas

  • “a group of statements” made in a society and their organization, thus providing an individualization of discursive formations


Lauren S. Weingarden

  • discursive art historiography

  • a method of viewing the work of art as an encoded articulation of a historically-bound, yet multi-faceted, matrix of social systems or cultural events

  • roots her analysis in visual and verbal realms in order to define appropriately discursive practices of an era






Chevaillier, F. (2007) ‘Interpretive Conventions in Site-Specific and Experimental Art: An analysis of Richard Serra’s Sculptures and Joseph McElroy’s Fictions’, European Journal of American Studies. Available at: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/1553


 

2. Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination


Extreme intentionalism

  • idea that what goes on in a fictional representation is supplied solely by what its author intended its reader to imagine


Intention

  • identifies certain dimensions of intentions that any account of their role (or lack thereof) in determining fictional content should endorse.



Stock, K. (2017) ‘Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination’, Oxford University Press, Available at: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/only-imagine-fiction-interpretation-and-imagination/


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