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Life of the Author, or How I Came to Hate [Literary Theory]
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And thus the distinction between English Language and English Literature graduates is defined.
there is no such thing as "English language" courses in the school system of Canada, as far as I know, besides linguists who specialize in English, at which point they would be called Linguistics graduates i would imagine
English classes = English literature, and a complete absence of instruction on the English language, where writing skills are developed only through massive reading assignments and trial-by-fire essay writing
they still usually end up better writers than students in technical disciplines where there is no time to learn how to write because the schedule is so cramped, and by default, the vast majority of people are really bad writers when they enter university
This is essentially a much more comprehensive version of the post I made earlier. Understanding the history of literary criticism is almost as important as understanding the various schools of theory themselves.
The early French feminist school of theory might not be nearly as radical and outspoken if it hadn't been for the hegemony of psychoanalytics in the field, Lacan in particular. This doesn't mean you have to be a confrontational asshole to advocate a feminist reading of a text, it just tended to happen that way for understandable reasons.
In fact most of the field in the last 40 years has been responses to dominant interpretations (feminism, border theory are good examples) which leads their authors to feel like they need to be as abrasive as possible. I don't know how much of that you can tease apart from their ideas (can you separate Derrida's ideas from his insufferable attitude?) but it's an annoying tendency in the field.
Your point about understanding the limitations of particular interpretations is well made. It makes me wonder just how utterly convinced some critical authors are about their methods, because most of the time it seems like they believe only in their favored school of thought and dismiss all others outright. I seem to recall that Saiid wasn't as bad as Anzaldua, Cixous, and Foucault, but it's been a while since I read them. Singular devotion to a one interpretation always turned me into an instant skeptic.
when the indigo children come
Yes. Since at least Kenneth Burke and his work A Grammar of Motives (1945), literary critics in the Anglosphere have been looking to ever expand the applicability and relevance of their work. Burke in particular does this in the most fucking obtuse way. The first sentence of the introduction sets out an incredibility expansive intellectual project:
He doesn't deliver, at all. On the contrary, he takes what is a foundational question in ethics and the philosophy of language and he provides a conceptual scheme to "understand" these questions which is wholly unjustified and question begging. Moreover, he does it in the most obscure language possible. Basically, he attempts to import his shitty literary theory into domains which have no relevancy to literature at all for reasons unknown. I suspect that Burke in particular and perhaps all literary theorists simply wish to inflate the importance of their profession and so find it necessary to make everything whatsoever susceptible to their "analysis."
What comes after Burke is no better. You have individuals who seize upon Derrida and his conclusions about the nature of difference versus differance and use it to intellectually "fund" their expansionist project, of turning literary criticism into something more important than reading works of fiction.
I've read Derrida, and I've had Derrida explained to me in plain terms which are easily understandable (perhaps ironically, by an analytic philosopher). What these literary critics do to him is total bullshit and is not in accordance of what he was up to at all.
Of all the philosophers that I've read or attempted to read, Hegel is by far the most difficult. I don't know if he's being purposely obscure like Derrida, but the Phenomenology of Geist is a fucking slog. But there are amazing bits of brilliance in there.
Derrida is up to a couple of things:
1. He is concerned with the question of difference. To get around some of the problems of structuralism (binary opposites which give rise to ideology or whatever), it's necessary for his project to contemplate difference that has no sameness whatsoever -- in contrast to either (a) property difference (Object X has property y, Object P has property q) or (b) identity difference (A is A, A is not B, B is B, etc). Thus, he posits "differance"* which is supposed to be a difference without sameness. In the end, it just turns out to be sheer possibility (which we could simply get by having modal logic with Kripke semantics).
2. He wants to refute the privileging of thought and speaking over writing. His consideration of difference and differance and his attempted refutation of common notions of structuralism lead him to conclude that the model of writing is actually more in accord with how we experience and navigate the world than speaking or thinking. Simply, what makes things sensible to us in the world in terms of navigation? There's gaps and space between objects, which make it possible to navigate effectively through both space and time. Writing exhibits all of these qualities -- there are "gaps" between words, and we also must be mindful of what has come before (the previous word, sentence, paragraph, or page) and what is yet to come (the next word, sentence, paragraph, or page). Derrida thinks that speaking and thinking don't exhibit these properties, and since he also argues that these properties are necessary for us to experience the world, the privileging of speaking and thinking over writing is unjustified and incorrect.
Thus, "everything is a text."
*Differance is a joke. In French, the word difference is differance, and there's no way to tell apart the two meanings when a person speaks. It's only possible when you are reading. Get it? Ha, ha.
Just read Richard Rorty and everything will be okay.
You wrote this sentence and you think it is better than "It means we should ignore the author".
You wrote this sentence and you think it is better than "It means we should ignore the author".
You wrote this sentence and you think it is better than "It means we should ignore the author".
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
I'm passing familiar with Rorty. What does he have to say about this?
As to the two points, the first doesn't explain much without context, but I don't expect you to provide an exposition here, and the second, to the extent that your summary is accurate (which is not on you if it isn't, again, I'm not asking for a treatise), describes an insight the quality and profundity of which can be had for the price of your average dime bag.
I spoke figuratively. Surely this is obvious?
"Killing the author" means eliminating the concept of the author having complete control over the text, and giving control to the reader/audience, of which the author is only a part. Do you object to the idea of the audience being what determines (or at least a massive part of what determines) meaning in art? Do you object to the particular gerund "killing? Are you suggesting that this is a flowery equivalent to "we should ignore the author," despite the fact that it is not? What is your objection there?
Using "scriptor" instead of "author" is an attempt to distance the idea of "the writer who creates the text" from all the baggage that the concept of "author" carries. Words have attachments and connotations. If you are refuting the commonly accepted (at the time) idea of the author, it is useful to employ a different word to contain the information you are presenting in your new concept. This is a common rhetorical device that works quite well. What is your objection to that?
i have no particular investment in or deep familiarity with social constructivism, but what is your objection to it, out of curiosity?
As an aside, I am semi-interested in some examples of the fruitfulness of the death of the author principle because thus far, the suggestions have been... not good.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
It produces nothing testable, interesting or worthwhile. It is pretty much a yar boo sucks to the hard sciences. You can get almost everything there is to get out of the field by acknowledging the following sentence:
"Some things are socially constructed".
Why would we possibly object to the idea that all forms of human endeavour are merely the product of negotiations regarding entirely subjective inscriptions, inscrutable without the social contracts of a particular elitist group?
The fact that it was taken even further by Bloor in the Ediburgh Strong Program doesn't help either.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
The idea that the author doesn't get final say in what a text means, and that looking at a text through the author alone limits critical interpretation, was not banal at the time. It's not really banal now, since so many readers still do that very thing.
Your reading, suggesting that I am saying "the author gains his authority by virtue of the name," is flatly incorrect. Author and authority are etymologically related, but this does not create authority in the concept of the author. It does not make people believe that the author is an authority because they sound the same. This kind of linguistic oogedy-boogedy is a superficial and disingenuous reading of any competent poststructuralist (not that I would claim to be either, necessarily). It's backwards. At most, etymological relationships reveal conceptual relationships.
The baggage of the word "author" is not especially its etymology. Your assumption that this is what I meant seems to be symptomatic of your bias against poststructural thought. The baggage of the word "author" is simply the ideas related to the concept of the author - ownership of the text, the writer being the absolute origin point of the text, Romantic aesthetic ideas of art as expression of the creative self, etc. We already know what "author" means, and it's not just "the guy what wrote that there book." If your essay is proposing a different concept, using a different word is probably a good idea.
As for your aside: well, for one thing, it's pretty handy to be able to read and interpret a text and consider it a worthwhile exercise of aesthetics even if the author is dead or unknown.
Another thing would be that sometimes authors try to tell you what their book is about, and they're really bad at it, like Dante, apparently. Writing a book or creating a piece of art doesn't mean you necessarily understand what you've created. Sometimes authors flat out lie, because artists are often jerks like that, or they refuse to provide an interpretation, or approve one that is offered.
Dumbledore is gay. Word of God, Rawling says so, therefore the character is. And no one gets to say otherwise. Why? Because the author clearly and simply stated so. But its not something that got any time in the text. But according to what I'm hearing from the pro-Literary Theory crowd is that if they read the text, and in the text it never says so, because its something that never comes up and is in the long mostly irrelevant, then the character loses his gayness, merely because they don't see it, because its not in the text.
This makes my point very clear, because it provides a nice binary system, either the character is, or isn't, gay. So which is it? Who gets to say? I vote for the author, the person, the owner of the character and the story. Why? Because it is their creation. And no amount of screaming Harry Potter fanboys gets to say otherwise.
Much like you can put any meaning you want onto just about any media, having an opinion of art in no way changes the intent or meaning of the art/text. I fail to see how Literary Theorists are anything other than literature fanboys who decided to get together and make their fanboy intrepretations of old stories into a school of academic thought. Really I'm just impressed that the rest of academia lets them hang out. Although I suppose they do get technical writers out of the deal, lets the rest of the sciences get around to doing real work without having to type everything up.
I actually agree with most of your comments about the differences in literary criticsm and natural sciences. Especially what you said about applying rational and logical analysis to literature. That is entirely in line with what I think. That's the part I'm adamant about. It's when we apply something like "associative reasoning" that I think literary criticism abandons rational and logical analysis and loses its value.
I could quibble about whether the distinctions you made about evidence, the framework of classical logic and so on, aren't also true of literature, but that's really just a matter of opinion or rather how we think of the underlying concepts of the terms we use. To you it seems enough to disqualify literary criticism as science, to me it's just a different application of scientific rigour.
Your later distinction about theoretical and applied literary criticism, I can go along with. I'm entirely interested in the latter, not in the former. That is to say, I find what you call "applied literary criticism" worth talking and debating about. Questions about "theoretical literary criticism" I find less engaging, personally. It's not a topic I feel any desire to talk about or debate. I'll happily pick up whatever tools, methods and approaches people develop... but that aspect of talking about theory, I have no stake in.
Yes. Although I've found, that since I am less interested in contemporary avantgarde literature, but rather in the kind of literature that is most likely to seep into the mainstream and become part of our cultural capital, any approach that marginalises authorial intent and voice doesn't strike me as particularly helpful. Simply because I see no reason to assume that the author's role is as diminished in the public's eye as it is in the circles of theory. The Dumbledore example above ties into this nicely, I think.
People do care about the author, when they read the text. Why else would it annoy some of them so, that Rowling declared Dumbledore gay? And that's reason enough for me to pay attention to the author when analysing a text.
I'm not wholly sure though if we agree or disagree on the last point though.
What the author thinks matters to you - even if the author didn't write some fact x into their book, even if the book leaves itself open on the question of whether or not x is the case, if the person who wrote the book later says, "Oh, hey, x is totally the case," this matters to you. That person who wrote it has the unique and privileged ability to interpret and expand upon it - such that they cannot be wrong in their interpreation or expansion. Now, perhaps it is the case that most people are of just such a mind - perhaps a large majority treats the text of a book as having a unique and special link to the person who wrote it, such that years later, even if the author has a new idea that never occurred to them at the time they were writing, they can declare that idea present in their work and they must be correct. They are the author, and that means that you care what they think about their work.
All I'm saying is that this is one way of looking at literature - one approach to understanding it. It may be the approach that you and a majority of people favour, but would you admit that this is not the only way? To some people, this may look strange and suspect - the words that the author wrote have their own meaning, after all, that subsists independently of the author (even, perhaps, independent of any reader - or, by contrast, utterly depdendent on the knowledge and background of the reader).
In contrast to the Dumbledore example, what if we tackle the Special Edition versions of the original Star Wars films (since you're a self-avowed pop-culture man)? We can certainly accept this new version of the flims as correct and definitive (because Lucas says they are - animated Jabba and Cloud City windows and all), but that's not the only choice. After all, the original triliogy cut still stands on its own, and hasn't been destroyed. We can say that there are two versions of the Star Wars films - you get to choose which one you like more, and if you want to analyze, criticize, or review the trilogy, you can decide which one to work with. You could even analyze both versions, with the view to showing one to be more thematically or stylisticaly coherent than the other. The point is that just because the author issued new versions does not mean that the old versions no longer stand on their own, and cannot be analyzed productively - they are cultural products whose content on film was fixed 30 years ago. You don't need to know anything about George Lucas to get interesting ideas out of Star Wars - and you don't need to credit every interesting idea that you can pull out of Star Wars as being in the minds of Lucas (and his collaborators). Of course, you can decide to do this, but I'm not sure what it gets you.
So, if I have a different attitude towards authors than you, I might not necessarily be interested in what they have to say about their work. They made their art, the released it to the world, and now their art belongs to the history, the culture and the readers. Even if they go so far as to produce a new version, it is still true that they produced an old version before, and perhaps the old version is arguably more interesting than the new one. Maybe an author's mistake can be more interesting than what they intended to do - maybe the story they wrote with details left out is more interesting than the story they could have written with all the details filled in.
And if I'm only worried about how interesting a text is, maybe I don't have to worry about what the author has to say about it, for text remains as meaningful as ever whether the author lives or dies, whether they ever say anything about it or not.
So look, Joe - from my point of view, you are not wrong. You just value something I don't. And what I value (the meaning of text as it stands on it own) may not be somehting that you're much interested, for one reason or another. But do you think that there is a reasonable argument as to why is wrong to approach literature as I do? This is where I'm really unsure of what you think - do you think that it is right, or good, or naturally superior to approach literature the way that you do (you'd maybe say it was more "helpful"), or do you just think that the way you approach it is a product of what you happen to be interested in? Is your approach more "helpful" in any universal sense - is it helpful beyond helping you get to what you're interested in? Because if we're looking at the latter, then your way could be more helpful for you, and my way could be more helpful for me. Neither is naturally superior - each just constitutes a different tool, geared towards acheiving our own separate ends along different lines.
I mean, maybe you think I'm missing out on something interesting, but I'm more than willing to listen to an author analyze their own work - they can definitely point the way to some of the interesting ideas present in their books, as they put them together (though their own prejudices or preconceptions, as limited human beings like the rest of us, may well keep them from seeing every idea that could be reasonably drawn from their book). I just see no reason to retroactively incorporate changes or additions into a complete work, just because the author says so. If the author makes changes, then there are just two versions (as I said before), and if your only concern is how interesting the book is, then you must admit that it is perfectly possible for an author to make changes that makes their books less interesting - and therefore in such a case it would be better to ignore the author and stick to the text. There is, of course, also the possibility that the author could make a change that really improves their work - and in that case, a good reader should just forget about the older version and bring their critical lenses to bear on the new version. It's not about treating one as "authoritative" or "canon" - it's about looking for the most interesting texts and working with those, instead of working with less interesting ones.
Please accept my apologies for being unable to give you my ideas in the elegant and simple style you present yours with (and others, such as Evil Multifarious, have similarly put to use) - I had hoped that my ruminations would be shorter this time. To rephrase my question for you one more time: What is it that is unhelpful about looking at texts in my way? Even if most people approach literature differently, even if most people care about what an author says about their text, is there something wrong with a person who doesn't (or something wrong with his approach to literature)?
EDIT: While I'm not totally sure how I feel about "inscrutable", I really like your point, Hatch. In both cases, we are talking about something that is really hard to do well, and takes a lot of hard work for all but the greatest geniuses in their fields to do well. No wonder people hate it, as everyone is forced to try and do it in school year after year (though few will have any talent at it), taught by educators who probably have very little ability themselves (and will be unable to do much to help either the struggling or the brilliant student). I mean, that sounds like bullshit.
The strategy with which you dissect a piece of writing should be dependent entirely on what you're trying to look at. If you want to divine the author's intent, the author's other works and words, historical context, and other influences will be helpful. If you want to view it as a window into the slice of culture occupied by the author, you can approach it that way too. If you want to view it as a discrete work and ignore outside influences and just see what sort of implications and interpretations might arise when it is viewed in a vacuum, that's fine too; not because you'll get at some objective meaning looming over it like a platonic ghost, its perfect form waiting to be glimpsed by a new critical lens, but because it might yield interesting thoughts and insights that could be valuable in their own right.
If you want the richest experience, you'd probably do all of the above, but who has the time.
I'm liking this in many ways, OtherHorseman - for style and content.
I don't know if it matters to me. I'd argue that it's relevant for the things that I think literary criticism is for (or at least the way I use it in an academic context). But when I read something privately, I have little interest in what the author says about his book. It has not much bearing on my understanding or appreciation (usually). I didn't much care that Dumbledore was declared gay by Rowling, because that character's sexuality had absolutely nothing to do with anything in the books that I cared for.
And as far as the authors right to retroactively change the text or what it is supposed to mean goes, I don't really have a definite stance on that. For example, I don't think that Deckard was a replicant all along. And even if, the movie was not highly valued, influential and important because of that aspect of the film. I honestly don't care how often Ridley Scott wants to recut the film to make that specific reading more obvious. And I think the movie (and the ending especially) holds up so much better when you treat Deckard as a human almost devoid of humanity, due to his actions and the world he inhabits and Roy Batty as a machine that evolves into a fully human being (morally, spiritually, metaphorically,..), mere moments before he dies. I think that movie is much more poetic, grim and expressive than a story about one robot hunting down another. To die. Alone. In the rain.
So it's not like I am fundamentally opposed to the idea of removing the author from the text, or limiting how much authority he has over it. (I am of course fully away that director-film is not really comparable to author-novel, but my general point should be clear.) I think different texts require different approaches. And I don't see the point of ignoring one or the other out of ideological reasons. Even if I consider some approaches generally less useful than others.
Although I've always read texts with the assumption, that a text usually suggests the kind of framework it should be read in. That is because I expect every author to write a text for a certain purpose. That purpose might be just entertainment, it might be some kind of social commentary, it might be the attempt to portray a millieu accurately and truthfully, it might be to provoke a certain reaction in the reader, and so on... I think if you pay attention to the way a text is structured and written, that purpose can be inferred to give you a hint how it should be read, i.e. how it should be framed. (With all the possibilities for errors, inferences bring with them.) That is the only aspect of author's intent I find difficult to do away with. It's why I don't really have any use for deconstructive readings of texts. I never felt I learned anything useful about a text when reading a deconstructive analysis of it. But others might have had more luck.
(As an aside. I am not convinced that words have meaning outside of the way we use them to communicate something. So I probably wouldn't agree with your assertion that words can have meaning independent of an author-reader situation. A symbol can only signify something when somebody uses it, on its own I'd say it's meaningless. And that also goes for texts in general. )
Not at all. But if I want to apply literary criticism in a serious, quasi-"scientific" kind of way as we alluded to here.. I don't do it for my own enjoyment. Or rather I am not motivated to do that, because I want to get "more" out of the text, have more "fun" or a "deeper understanding". I want to do it in order to say something about the text and how it pertains to the overall cultural landscape it is being read in. I analyse it, so I can say something about its cultural function. What draws people to such a text? Why is it valued? What does it say or provide, that makes it resonate with people? I think these are interesting and worthwhile questions to ask of popular and/or well regarded texts. And any analysis that is too far away from how people actually read a text, does not really help in answering those questions.
Now to be honest, I haven't really found any other academic application of literary criticism that doesn't somewhat go hand in hand with the ideas I just talked about. So when I mention my confusion about certain approaches to texts, it's not because I think that people are somehow wrong to do that or that their approach will not lead anywhere. It's because I find it difficult to find any relation to the questions above.
If what we are discussing here is the individual reader's freedom to approach any text in any way he feels like? That's not even question. Everything and anything goes.
I'm perfectly fine saying that if it's not in the text, then no one really knows. Rawling just has her opinion on Dumbledore's sexuality, but because it's not in the text it's impossible to prove.
Notice how I am not bound by either your proclamation that it's the word of god, or that it's a binary choice.
I also choose to believe that the Star Wars prequels did not happen, and that the Timothy Zahn canon takes precedence. This is because Zahn's stories are better. Lucas's intentions mean jack crap to me because they have been revealed to be garbage.
edit:: And I'd say that literary theory does have a point - just like not all opinions are created equal, neither are all interpretations. Some are just better than others, more supported by the text, insight into the author and their upbringing, the times in which it was written, and the personal experiences of the reader. I think it's very possible for another person to have a better handle on the meaning and significance of a work than the author, or even understand why the author wrote it the way they did better than they themselves do.
steam profile
I don't believe that every text is written for one, single, definable purpose. I think very few texts are written with the intention of achieving a certain goal. I don't think many writers write with the intention that their text should be interpreted in a certain way. So if you believe that the intent of literary criticism is to divine the purpose to which the author intended a given text, then I don't agree, because I don't believe any text has a single purpose.
If you can even consider a text to have a purpose, then that purpose will differ for every reader.
I also don't agree that this is the sole purpose of literary criticism. To determine the social function of a given text is a valuable pursuit, but it is not the only function of criticism. Equally valuable is the elucidation of what a given text means to an individual, or within a given worldview. You put 'fun' and 'understanding' in quotations, but these are also valuable goals of literary criticism. Basically, I think this definition of the field is very narrow.
Out of curiousity, what's your background, education-wise? I've no intention of arguing from authority, but I would like to know if you've ever studied any of this.
For my part, I have very rarely seen anything particularly interesting produced by critics concerned explicitly with delving into the psychologies of authors through their books, or by critics concerned explicitly with revealing truths about current or historical social reality through books. This is not to say that it does not happen, but by my reconing of what constitutes something interesting, it does not happen often. On the other hand, a critic that approaches a literary work with the intent of exposing particular elements of the logic that drives it seems, to me, to have much better odds of saying something interesting that does happen to speak to the author's mind and to society and history. This is because the logical frameworks that can be found in texts that generate connection and meaning within them can themselves be turned to the data sets of history, society, and the minds of men to generate meaning there as well. Though as I said before, due to the complete and whole nature of a literary work, and the appalingly partial access we have to historical events, complex socieities, and private minds (let alone the compartive complexity of these versus a book), the imaginary worlds created in literature are far easier to draw these logical and structural insights from than history, society, and psychology.
It reminds me of a remark that Wittgenstein once made. He was fascinated by mathematics, and worked very hard over his life to try and show what the underlying logic of mathematics was. However, when he was nearing the end of his life, he turned increasingly to the theory of colour. This was not really a turn away from mathematics, but a reaffirmation of his interest, because he thought that if he could show the logic of colour (a simpler subject) then these same insights could be applied to understand the logic of math (a much more complicated subject). Now whether or not you think Wittgenstein was an idiot for working in this way with these subjects, I seems to me very reasonable to work in this way with literature and nature. Books are far simpler than minds, less complex than societies, more fully available and settled than the full historical record. For that reason, literature make a good candidate for analytical study which aims to draw out the logical frameworks inherent within them, for subsequent re-application to the more complex and less complete data sets mentioned above. The kind of literary study that I find myself drawn to is that which aims to find the order within the microcosm (the book) for the purpose of applying to the macrocosm (the world) - and in that way, the study of logical structures in texts can inform our world with new meaning and enrich our experience with new understanding.
Now, of course, it can be charged that such a view as mine relies on repugnant "anti-realism" or "idealism" or some such "ism" that denies that there is one purely objective logical order to the world. Such people as would charage this would also likely charge that any other psuedo-"logical" framework applied to the world is bound to generate a false meaning that we'd be better off without - and so to the degree that I am succeeding, I am failing to produce anything of value.
Now I would dispute all of this - but I don't think that this is really the thread to get into it. I would, however, note an interesting tension in some of the thinking going on here. Many people seem fond of the idea that the meaning of the text is created by an engagement between a reader and the text (or maybe the author's intentions). The structure and logical relations that drive meaning are allowed to fluctuate based on the reader who engaged with the text in question. However, these same people would likely object to the notion that the structure and logical relations of the world itself in some way depend on the subject engaging with the world - this ordering is absolute, and subsists independent of any observer. I, on the other hand, would insist that our language as it exists today has a logical structure that it independent of individual speakers, and that texts written in our language build logical frameworks of inter-connected meaning that are still there even if no one is reading the book. And conversely, while I old the "meaning" of texts to be more "objective" than most, I would also hold the logical structure of the world to be more "subjective" than most. The world for us has aquired the logial structure it has by virtue of our history of interaction with it, and, indeed, it is conceptually possible to understand it along completely alien lines by means of different logics. All these logics, once developed, would be equally "objective", but none would be naturally superior. So my theory of literature looks much like my theory of the world - which, again, perhaps explains why I think you can take results from good literary criticism and have them enrich your experience and knowlege of the world. There is nothing to stop a species (even our species) from applying a para-consistent logic to the natural world, and seeing what insights drop out (though those who cannot see what these may be will scoff - a blind man could easily doubt the stars, or the products of astronomy).
TL;DR - Joe is good people, and you will probably think I'm retarded.