Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Magic, Dragons, and Comp Theory
No, wait for it, stay with me. In Dungeons and Dragons there is a class of wizard known as an "invoker." So when I saw that "Writers conjure their vision [for the audience's role]...by using all the resources of language available to them to establish a broad, and ideally coherent, range of cues for the reader," (Ede and Lunsford in VV 90) I immediately imagined some jehovian-bearded scribe locked away in his basalt monolith, scratching spells into a moldy tome, envision the entities he would bind to his will with the mystic symbols thus inscribed.
The analogy isn't too far off really. That "range of cues" is like the summoning circle that you fit your audience into. Since you can't know exactly what will speak to exactly that audience, you imagine them as best you can and give them hints to make the reader match the writing. And anyone who hasn't felt the magic in a well written piece is a robot, lobotomized or dead.
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