First off, thanks to
davem for finding this article. I find myself solidly in the CT/
Inziladun camp regarding sympathies but that hardly sets me apart on this site...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendė
On a different note - what does the journalist mean by a "gigantic audience, culturally far removed from the writer who conceived it"? Obviously in a literal sense, almost everyone is 'culturally far removed' from Tolkien, an academic who has long since passed away, he's effectively from another world, and even while alive he lived in a rareified world. Does the writer mean that the masses 'culturally far removed' cannot understand just what Tolkien meant? Or does this have a more post-modern meaning, that now his works are out there, adapted, sub-created, thoroughly well used, that the readers/audience have more 'ownership' than those who currently hold the copyright?
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I took it, as you suggest, in the sense of
"dead academic of medieval things" vs. "living, less-educated children of the 30-second soundbite and Hollywood glitz", and in that respect I didn't read it as a post-modern idea at all. Within the context of the article, it seemed less to me to suggest that people today
can't get the message; rather that they probably
won't--not because it is inaccessible but because they are habituated to receiving things in the Hollywood mode--and Jackson has now given them the Hollywood mode.
Mind you, I already thought that beforehand, so I might be revealing *my* assumptions rather than uncovering those of the original French author...
