[on and around the topic of] overly literal & inflexible reading styles

[brainwane]

Related to each other:
* affirmational fandom
* Joss Whedon's "Heart (Broken)" from Commentary! The Musical, also in This American Life
* "Our Reaction to “Cat Person” Shows That We Are Failing as Readers" by Larissa Pham
* The Twitter discussion starting "There's a modern (or at least louder in modern era) tendency in both fiction and the interpretation of fiction that every narrative be some sort of very specific kind of hyper-literal puzzle box that can be "solved" by wikis and lore and clues" by Scott Benson, and a related discussion started by Brandon Rhea
* Biblical literalist theology & strict constructionist judicial interpretation

Edited to add: See seekingferret's comment below for an objection to the word "overly" in the previous title of this entry, "overly literal & inflexible reading styles". Potentially a fair cop! I'm like handwaving around here talking about constellations of related things, not saying "every thing in this list entirely fulfills every one of these characteristics [Figure A]".

Comments

[seekingferret]

I object to the framing in your header. I find a lot of interesting ideas in the essays you link to, though I don't agree with everything in any of them, but I agree with the author of the essay on affirmational fandom that affirmational fannish enterprise is not inherently 'overly' anything. Affirmational and Transformational fandom are two different approaches to text, but transformational fandom is not inherently superior or inherently more dynamic or creative or culturally resonant. And both Biblical literalist theology and strict constructionist judicial interpretation can be extremely creative and generative analytical processes.

[brainwane]

I sure hope people don't assume I agree with every sentence or argument I link to here!

If there are names, in biblical studies or judicial interpretation methodology, for overly literal & inflexible approaches that shut down conversation, I would like to know them -- for at least a decade or more I've understood literalism and strict constructionism to be the commonly understood names for those approaches.

[seekingferret]

Finding the vocabulary to talk about Biblical literalism is part of the program of this post: https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/234329.html The short answer is that I don't completely know, but that I think there's a sharp bifurcation in the discourse between the language used by the in-group and the out-group, and that "Biblical literalist theology" seems to be much more a term used by atheist critics than a term truly used by the people the atheists claim to be describing.