I'd only read Ender's Game once before, probably around 3 years ago, maybe a little more. I remember liking it, but it didn't make a huge impression on me. (I managed to remember just one of the two surprise elements that were included at the end of the movie when it came out.) On this reading, I noticed a lot more intriguing details (e.g., Graff's weight changes) and found myself very curious about what kind of leader Peter is as Hegemon. More on this later.
In Session 2, Dr. Olsen spoke about possible interpretations of the computer games that Ender obsessively plays during his free time (the Giant's Drink and the End of the World). The imagery is certainly interesting, and provocative. I hadn't really focused on the games, but Dr. Olsen pointed out that the story actually invites us to interpret these games, by offering the characters' interpretations of them.
This led seamlessly into a discussion which I like to call (somewhat facetiously) "Why We Don't Need to Listen to Authors." Best quote:
"Have you ever had the experience, of reading a book that you found really interesting, and then you listen to the author talk about it, and with the kinds of things that they actually were thinking and were intending, you're like: Dude, have you even read your own book?"More seriously, Dr. Olsen concurs with C.S. Lewis that "It is the author who intends; the book means." That is, the meanings of a text are not unlimited, but they are not necessarily bound by the author's own subjective intent. Once the text is released into the wild, it is the reader's province to say what the text means. There is a range of objectively reasonable interpretations which are actually supported by the text, and C.S. Lewis suggests that the true meaning of a book would ideally be discerned over time, essentially by consensus of fair-minded, intelligent readers (with sufficient background, if needed, in the genre or other aspects of the story that may need additional knowledge for comprehension).
I was interested to see that Dr. Olsen comes at this from a perspective of one who used to think highly of an author's intent; but this was due to his impatience with those who claimed that texts had no inherent meaning, and that readers were free to read anything they wanted into them. (He was perhaps a literary originalist, as a means of trying to rein in agenda-oriented re-readings of literary texts?)
By contrast, I had always rejected as irrelevant any attempt to consider an author's purported intentions or biographical details in the interpretation of a text. My position in high school and college was that the identity of the author was entirely immaterial; I didn't care whether the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written by Shakespeare, Bacon, or a team of drunken schoolgirls. I was a purist: It was the work itself that mattered, not the author. (Unlike Dr. Olsen's sparring partners, however, I felt strongly that there were correct interpretations and incorrect interpretations. I got particularly annoyed when certain teachers and students tried to read Christ allegories into everything. Actually, that would still bug me, but it doesn't seem to be in vogue these days. Unfortunately, there's still other symbolism that people seem to read in automatically, and reductively, without considering whether it actually enriches the story.) I've softened quite a bit on my former authors-don't-matter stance, but I still would rather focus on analyzing the text in the first instance, rather than trying to import whatever we think we might know about the author
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