07-03-2011, 08:29 AM
(07-03-2011, 06:48 AM)Charybdis Wrote: I never said Mary Stewart's intention was to belittle the reader or make him feel stupid; these are your words alone. It would rather be biting the hand that feeds you, don't you think?
Sorry, I was paraphrasing, albeit inaccurately. Here are the exact words to which I was attempting to respond:
Quote:If there are too many jokes/references that I don't get, I feel stupid and resent that the author apparently knows more than I do and is showing off. So an author should be careful to keep the level of supposedly shared knowledge in check.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you seem to place the burden on the author, rather than the reader. Why exactly should the author keep the "level of supposedly shared knowledge in check"? I don't think there's anything really all that abstruse or esoteric in these references and poetic allusions. It seems to me that an author should simply write at her natural level, feeling free to draw from her own fund of knowledge and stylistic resources, and assume that the appropriate readership will follow (in Stewart's case it did, and has).
Anyway . . . I think we're agreed on the major points (i.e., de gustibus non est disputandem) but we are in danger of chasing our tails over the minor Jesuitical differences.
Since you have read most of Stewart's other books, are there some you enjoyed more? Or is she in general just not your thing? (I tend to prefer her earlier books to the later, although I like the "Arthurian" series very much too. I read one of her very late books, The Stormy Petrel, and I did feel that it was weaker than the work from her heyday.)
