[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

[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.