One thing that fascinates me aesthetically is when people come up with interesting and plausible readings of a text that are consistent with everything the text says, but radically at odds with the author's intentions. Salon dot com has a really nice slideshow of ten prominent cases of this, where the another artwork reinterprets an earlier one, called "What if the villains actually were good?"
They miss two classics of the genre, which ends up being doubly unfortunate since they are writing in response to the recent translation of Yisroel Markov's The Last Ringbearer, which retells Lord of the Rings.
First, David Brin's classic essay "We Hobbits are a Merry Folk," (unfortunately you can't get the original essay now, it's been reworked in his recent book as "The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien versus the Modern Age;" still a great essay but with some of the aesthetics points retracted) excoriates the worst aspects of Tolkienian romanticism in part by taking seriously the claim that the book is a document written within the world in question by the winners to justify rule of Aragorn's lineage. Given everything we know about establishment of monarchies after agriculture in human societies, the implications are really disturbing.
Second, what Markov has done has already been fantastically accomplished by Jacqueline Carey in her Sundering duology: Banewreaker and Godslayer, which retells the Lord of the Rings as tragedy. The books are genuinely tragic, and become relentlessly depressing. As such they sold much less than her Kushiel series, which she returned to after finishing the Sundering. But they are abolute classics of the fantasy genre loved by afficionados and writers alike, and it's inexplicable to me that Lara Miller, author of a really fine book on Narnia, seems to be missing out on Brin and Carey's canonical contributions to Tolkieana and fantasy writing more generally.
I keep intending to write an aesthetics article on trangressive readings that succeed aesthetically. Interesting things happen to David Lewis' account. By his stipulation that admissible possible worlds determined by the fictional text must all be ones where the story is told as fact (I'm simplifying this), it follows that Brin's reading is LESS transgressive than one Tolkien would have accepted! And Carey's story too is a more plausible description of the world where The Lord of the Rings is told as fact, since Karl Marx taught us what getting told as fact really involves with such ideological works.
And there may be interesting lessens from this about what makes a transgressive reading of philosophical texts more or less successful. I think most such attempts fail aesthetically and philosophcally, but when they succeed they are really important. Indeed, one could argue that it is one of the marks of a great philosopher that they tell successful transgressive readings. Great philosophers (Kant) and many very good philosophers (Rorty) often have an unusual take on the history of philosophy and key figures so that it leads up to them. This almost always involves transgressive readings in the same sense of Brin or Carey.
The reason I haven't tried to work some of this data into an aesthetics article yet is that most of the action today about fiction in either in Kendall Walton's make-believe theory today or in debates about possible nominalistic construals of ficta. And these debates are really, really involved and complicated, with a level of depth somewhere around the level of depth surrounding debates about expressivism in ethics (though I've heard that Schroeder's recent book on non-cognitivism clears things up quite a bit). I'd potentially have to teach at least two classes to get up to speed to the point where I could write the article to fairly take into account recent work on fiction. I guess this is one of the benefits of co-writing though.
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