Juri asked:
"If Chandler, like other writers, is a sum of his experience,
then how can he be unmistakably him/herself?"
How can he not? No two people have exactly the same
experience. Add up those different experiences and you must
come up with a different whole.
You brought up cultural studies, well, encoding/decoding is
part of that. Simply put, encoding is what the author tries
to put into a work, decoding is what the reader takes from
it. This may or may not be the same thing. Also, different
readers take different things from a work, to the extent that
two different people may seem to be talking about two very
different books. We've seen that happen in discussions here,
where two people have to agree to disagree, not just about
the quality of a book, but even about what actually happened
in it. So why wouldn't the writer be thought of as just as
unique an individual as each reader?
Or put it in terms of chaos theory -- sensitive dependence on
initial conditions. Each person starts at a distinct point,
then has various circumstances impact upon them. No two
people run into exactly the same conditions. Plus all of the
previous conditions have an impact on how each new condition
impacts.
In other words, no two people are shaped by exactly the same
experiences, so "Chandler, [who] like other writers, is a sum
of his experience," must be a distinct individual who is
"unmistakably him/herself."
Guess I'm feeling philosophical on this Labor Day
holiday.
Mark
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