I learned today in class the definition of the word "flyting", which is insulting others, but in ways that are very entertaining. Shakespeare is considred the premier literary example of this, along with most everything else.

We also ended up discussing the merit(or lack thereof) of many high school English teachers, who simply put forward to you what they thought the author intended. This approach operates under what Northrop Frye would call intentional fallacy. He would say that what it means is what it has in it, which can be discerned by the patterns to be found within a text. Basically what this means is that what an author "meant" or "intended" ultimately doesn't really matter. Rather, it is the piece of work and what it contains within it that speaks.

This probably will have a great deal of relation to another question that the class will be dealing with: what is the difference between rhetoric and poetics? This is probably too soon to be putting out ideas for a reply but, judging from what Frye says and various peoples' interaction with folk who like to consider themselves English teachers, this is somethig: Perhaps rhetoric has an underlying point of persuasion beneath it, while poetics is concerned with the structure of art which considers persuasion or a particular grinding ax irrelevant.

Or I could be off-base. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.