The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Life of the Author, or How I Came to Hate [Literary Theory]
Eddy
Gengar the BittersweetRegistered User regular
Gengar the BittersweetRegistered User regular
Hello everyone, I was inspired to start this thread in light of one poster in another thread basically stating that authorial intent is not a relevant issue when interpreting or editing a text. This, as those of you who have taken English courses know, is the basis of Roland Barthes’ essay “Death of the Author”, and a forerunning argument of deconstructionism, and the imperfect ‘anticipations’ of that school of thought (New Criticism, etc etc).
I would like to counter that argument and state my opinion that authorial intent is to me if not the primary method of communicating meaning in a text, then a major influence on it. Authorial intent to me can be inferred by many factors, including several obvious demographic profilers such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, and so forth, along with more subtle factors such as their contemporary political views, societal views, etc.
If authorial intent is not the driving force of a text, then to me it certainly limits the interpretations of the text, regarding how a critical evaluation or editing of a work might be rendered incorrect due to that evaluation taking into consideration things that the author had not intended. Indeed, to me, not taking authorial intent into account when editing a text inherent changes the meaning of that text in a way that dilutes the text as a whole – it becomes neither owned by the author, nor falls into the public domain, but instead is only in the hands of the editors. The original text stands as it does due to the author, and any adjustment without taking the authorial intent into account is thus not truly the author’s work.
I would like to counter that argument and state my opinion that authorial intent is to me if not the primary method of communicating meaning in a text, then a major influence on it. Authorial intent to me can be inferred by many factors, including several obvious demographic profilers such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, and so forth, along with more subtle factors such as their contemporary political views, societal views, etc.
If authorial intent is not the driving force of a text, then to me it certainly limits the interpretations of the text, regarding how a critical evaluation or editing of a work might be rendered incorrect due to that evaluation taking into consideration things that the author had not intended. Indeed, to me, not taking authorial intent into account when editing a text inherent changes the meaning of that text in a way that dilutes the text as a whole – it becomes neither owned by the author, nor falls into the public domain, but instead is only in the hands of the editors. The original text stands as it does due to the author, and any adjustment without taking the authorial intent into account is thus not truly the author’s work.
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Eddy on
0
Posts
But I tend to look at all art as the product or extension of the person who created it. In those cases where a creator as such can be found at least, it gets a bit hazy when you have hundreds of people working on a project.
Death of the Author seems like willful ignorance to me, but perhaps it has more to do with being able to have an opinion different than that of the authors? Interested to see what others think, I'm an engineer not an english major (or swedish equivalent thereof).
I choose to ignore the more illogical interpretations of the work, such as a feminist interpretation of Hamlet, etc. I don't think Shakespeare intended for that.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Authorial intent is a valid way of approaching a text, but it is not the only way, and not even always the best way. To limit oneself to intention is to ignore underlying attitudes of the society that creates a story, or disallows notions or ambiguities that are created by a reader who has not had the same experiences in life as the author. To compare it to videogames: Sometimes when you play Fallout 3 or Red Dead Redemption, you participate in a sequence of events that the engine could allow for but the developers never intended; all writing, under this theory, has teh same shit going on. When you work in language, in a setting that is a form of communication, you are creating a system that may interact in ways you never can predict.
I also take issue with the consolidation of all Theory to Deconstructionism, when post-colonial, eco-study, feminist, queer-, formalism, etc., are still alive and floating around. Hell, eco-theory is really new. But what these different types of readings allow us-- that a strict reading from the authorial point of view doesn't-- is a new way of understanding the text. When someone, to take your example, does a feminist reading of Hamlet, the play becomes something else, something new. A good interpretation under this lens sees the action of Hamlet maybe enacting a unconscious social concern of the times, or expressing a subtle misogyny that the author held but never viewed himself as having. It seems random to do, but it can be enlightening, it can make Hamlet something new.
/english major
Of course, I simplified to ease the argument, which was wrong of me. I just don't particularly think reading it in a certain manner to fit a new world view that Shakespeare could never have foresaw as well, particularly canonical. It is interesting to study, yes, but it's just not an interpretation I would espouse as being core or central to the text.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
I think at the base of the matter, the problem is the difference between your own goals for reading and the goals of someone who be interested in literary theory in the first place. The criticism of the work that espouses the new view point is not striving for canonicity, but to suggest a different way the text might be taken than it has canonically. On a surface level, nothing about Hamlet changes, but the feminist reading adds a new layer to the work. The caveat here is that it's done right, and often it isn't. (Also, it's hard for me to work with Hamlet as I've never actually read it.)
Also, and I forgot to mention this, there is a problem when authorial intent is largely unknown, which can lead to stuff like Chinua Achebe's obsessive hatred of Joseph Conrad. (Achebe really, really thinks Heart of Darkness is racist, and it may or may not be.)
You have some sort of device that lets you divine intent? Not to be rude or snarky at you, but honestly I can not definitively claim Shakespeare's intentions in Hamlet and no one else can either. Even discounting the very unlikely schools of thought, there are still at the very least dozens of plausible and compelling theories on what exactly each scene means or what Shakespeare meant to say. How do you pick which one is canonical when there are many that are equally valid?
That's my whole issue with taking into account the intent of the author, in most cases it is entirely unknowable because there is no record of it, or worse the author changes their mind about what the work means and muddies the water about it. I've read several compelling papers about Taming of the Shrew for instance, each working from the text and others Shakespeare wrote. They all had different conclusions. Most of them were absolutely throughly researched. How do you determine which is the canonical or correct intepretation?
The funny thing is I was looking through my old term papers and one of them is a defense of Derrida (or, rather, a critique of New Criticism). Sometimes I just like not knowing, I suppose.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
It's useful to talk about different sorts of readings, but those general readings don't actually exist. What you have are things like "John Smith's reading of Hamlet at 10:00 through 2:00 on 4/7/54", which may or may not be similar to "Jake Brown's reading of Hamlet at 5:45 through 6:15 on 6/22/84" in ways that may be worth grouping or differentiating between the two.
And that's not even getting into the fact that readings aren't truely unified, either. Someone's perspective on the work will actively shift as they read it, due to learning new things about the work and having their view on the previous sections altered. Even if they've memorized everything about the formal content of the work and have decided on an exact reading that they will consistantly follow, their focus will still shift to different parts of the work as they observe it.
Of course, that doesn't account for analysis performed without directly observing the work itself. I'll have to think about how to classify that.
I think that's a common misreading or at least a convenient simplification of Barthes' essay. It's not just about discrediting the author as the dominant force of meaning creation in a text. It's also about the "birth of the reader", that is to say the reader as an active agent essential to giving a text meaning.
Or put in another way. Barthes' argument was not that the author has no bearing on what a text means, but that author and reader are both influential in making sense of a text.
So I agree with you, that authorial intent cannot and should not be ignored when trying to make sense of a text; but I would also agree with Barthes in so far that the author is not the only authority on the meaning of a text, and that meaning is - for lack of a better word - negotiated between the text of the author and the interpretation of the reader.
I then picked up Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today and the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory just to be done with it all and give myself some parameters to work with.
I feel conflicted because on one hand while knowing what the author intended would help, sometimes being able to run away with a theory is fun too. Plus now that I write stories I sometimes just write because I thought it was a good idea without much thought into what I really mean and I feel literature works the same way, so eliminating the author helps because sometimes they just write for the hell of it.
As for older works, if the author wants his text to have a certain effect on the reader, but changes in culture and new historical events mean that it, in fact, has a different effect, should we change the text to compensate for the desire of the author, or leave it as it? For example, having Shylock as a greedy, unscrupulous Jew may have made sense in the 1600's, but today that portrayal carries with it a whole lot of baggage. Do performances of Merchant of Venice that portray Shylock as unfairly treated damage the play? If the author wanted Shylock to be greedy, would it make more sense to make Shylock into a Wall Street investor, the typical modern symbol of greed?
The phrase "Death of the Author" is a bit overdramatic and was probably more intended to draw attention to that school of criticism than it was to be an accurate description of its ideas.
Shylock WAS unfairly treated though. He points that out himself in the courtroom scene (and others - the "has not a jew eyes" speech and his early dialogue with Antonio), and quite persuasively. I don't think portraying him that way is an imposition on the text.
(Which is not to say I disagree with your point necessarily, just your choice of example)
In addition, authors have been known to change their opinions and interpretations of their own works. Salman Rushdie did so after the fatwa, so what is more valid: his pre-fatwa readings of his own work or his later re-interpretations?
In the end, the writer is a reader like any other. If they code some hidden meaning into their works and that's all there is to them, chances are that these works aren't particularly interesting to begin with. A lot of the most interesting literature cannot be translated into some facile "This is what the author wanted to say," because if it could, the work wouldn't need to be written to begin with.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
When you read something not of your culture you inherently gain an outsiders perspective. Research and understanding the culture can offset this somewhat but there will always be the anthropological angle to your reading.
Why would it be considered a bad job? I mean if the author just wrote to write something interesting that was on his mind but he really had no intent besides telling a good story, is that considered bad writing? Must all works then have an intent and meaning behind them?
sorry if this question doesn't make sense I'm kind of tired.
I was going to say something more or less like this, but instead I will just quote it and say "this".
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I think that no matter what the text is, it must have meaning - even a carefree, light reading will have inherent intent. Even if that meaning is as simple as "sometimes an apple is just an apple", or even a mess of contradictory thoughts. But since language is sort of the vehicle of meaning, there must be something within the text. Whether the author did a bad job of it I suppose only muddles how easily extracted it is.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
The whole context of books is sort of structured around being a readerly or writerly text anyway. Sometimes a book is more for the reader to experience, other times its more for the writer to experience (and happen to let the reader observe their experiments).
A detective novel is more of a readerly text, involving the reader in figuring it all out as they go, but a typical novel/memoir is more about watching that author (who the reader knows in this case) write about what they know best and learning about them as a person.
Ideally, the death of the author is exactly as has been talked about here: a way to separate the book from the author to learn new things about it. Without being able to separate a work of art from its shitbag artist, how would I ever watch a Mel Gibson movie or read The Fountainhead? There are some inherent perks to the author just plain being ignored, though I'd imagine most tend to enjoy knowing about the author's intent too greatly, which is probably where this whole critical theory arose out of, considering the need to know exactly who wrote this book and why.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
The whole point of the postmodern intellectual movement was to undermine fundamental assumptions about reality and experience, ideas that have been around since the enlightenment. Dethroning humanist values based on human beings as the origin point of meanings and thoughts and so on is intensely disturbing, as it is meant to be. Everyone finds these notions scary; the key is to discover how they are also liberating and powerful.
For literature, that means not only confronting the fact that the author is a focal point of enormous cultural forces that far antecede him, but also that a text and its language can be unmoored from that origin point and examined in relation to other contexts. This is a wonderful and fascinating thing that leads to much more energetic interpretation and criticism.
However it is also important to note that this is an idealized notion, and that there is almost always an orthodox critical position on any text. Not coincidentally it is the greatest authors who refute attempts to pin down an absolute solution to their text and engender debate over orthodoxy for decades or centuries.
In New Criticism you look to the text to tell you what the book is about. You confine yourself to the words of the text and you try and figure out from there what interesting things are happening (intellectually or artistically) in the book. Since you are READING A BOOK it doesn't seem too crazy to ask people to LOOK A THE TEXT in order to find out the meaning of the book.
Look, good authors write well. Most of the books that will be studdied are well written - we are usually told that they are written by the greatest authors ever to write. Usually, we expect that people who write or speak well will communicate what they mean to communicate (since writing is a form of communication). So all you should need to get what the author intended you to get is their book - and then you read the text and you get what they intended you to get. PROBLEM SOLVED - the meaning of "just the text" should also be what the author meant it to mean if it was written by a good writer.
It's like if someone was world acclaimed as a fine orrator - an excellent, motivating, and throught-provoking speach-giver - but after some people listen to him speak, they say, "Well I don't know what he meant to say, really. I'll have to do some research on his life to find out." Isn't part of being a great orator the fact that he communicates what he means to say? If he can't communicate what he means in a speach, can he really be that good?
Now, of course, you can find all kinds of things in a text that an author may not have "intended" to be there - but they intended to build the text just the way they did, and so, you might say, whatever can be logically and reasonably drawn out of their creation is also a by-product of their intended meaning. Sometimes you don't realize all the conclusions that lead from a single premise - or a group of premises - that you may hold, but that doesn't mean that your endorsement of the premises does not ENTAIL your endorsement of the conclusions. If that logical relation is there, then whether or not you intended to hold that conclusion, if you hold the necessary premises, then you de-facto hold the conclusion.
Going to outside sources to try and understand the author of a text (such as other people's reminisences, historical circumstances, their grocery lists, et cetera) may be interesting, but they do not constitute literary analysis. Nor can they break a logical connection if it really exists in a text. Good essays and interepretations of literature are full of textual evidence, linked together to show interesting logical consequences of the textual construct - and no amount of outside history can make or break these arguments.
So, you can have your cake and eat it too: you can get to know all about the mind of the writer, through understanding the logic of the world the writer has created. Through coming to grips with the strangeness and beauty of a complex creation, you come to understand the greatness of the mind that conceived that creation. And while it may be tempting to look away from trying to understand the logic of a whole world on its own terms in favour of digging up a few easy to understand historical facts, I think that is really a distraction from getting to know the mind of a great author. They are most revealed in what they write.
As to all the other brands of literary criticism, if they are legitimate, then they're just new ways of finding logical connections in texts (and therefore what I would call a new-critical-type application). If they're not about finding meaning in texts, but about something else (finding meaning in history, finding meaning in images, et cetera) and then using THIS information to say something ABOUT a book, then I'm not so sure that that is literatry analysis - whether or not it may be interesting. I'm not saying that it's not worthwhile, either. I just think that serious literary analysis is what belong in a serious English class. Though this may be because I am extremely bitter from sitting through seminar classes in which every idiot around the table wanted to tell everyone which characters they liked or didn't like. You just want to tell them, "Analyze the literature or get the hell out of my classroom!"
Okay, sorry for going on, I'm done now.
They are liberating and powerful, in much the same way that amorality and sociopathy is liberating and powerful. You're removing an essential component of meaning generation, namely the frame within which texts are produced and read, and declaring the following freefall into incoherency and irrelevance an "energetic interpretation and criticism".
I think you have it completely backwards here. The greatest authors are the ones that allow for an absolute solution to the text. At least as far as "absolute solution" is possible. What makes them so great, and what engeders debate, is the fact that every individual believes to recognise the clarity of the text's meaning and it is the differences that suddenly appear as you talk about the text, that make things so engaging.
Take Hamlet, or Lolita, or Huckleberry Finn, Great Gatsby or even Ulysses. These texts aren't held in high esteem because people cannot agree on what they mean. They are held in high esteem, because they speak to us clearly and explicitly. Great literature isn't a puzzle, it's a piercing clarity.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Intent is important and some works rely on it more heavily than others. "The Jungle" comes to mind as an example of a novel with a clear intent.
I would say that most literature do not require a complete understanding of the author's intent to enjoy or to get some meaning. Both approaches can provide a different interpretation of the same text, and the question is whether one is more valid than the other.
Of course, this is all from a layman's point of view.
Ironic that the only reason that anyone knows what The Jungle is now is that everyone completely ignored the author's intent. It's a terrible book, especially at expressing its intended points.
Huck Finn comes to mind for me, given that it was written specifically as a satire of a known issue. You can't really get any clearer without a journal article-type title.
I think you are carrying this a bit far. The idea behind death of the author/"new criticism"/whatever isn't to tear a work free from the author or from its social/historical context.
I don't understand the reasoning behind this view. Even if we assume that shakespeare wasn't thinking about women's liberation when he wrote hamlet (or lord knows macbeth), that doesn't mean the work has nothing to say about those issues. Most of the literature that's stood the test of time well enough to make this discussion relevant has done so because it presents themes that are applicable in many societies and time periods.
I also don't really know how that school of thought can understand a work in which the author's intent is to be ambiguous.
Is it fair to say that in some idealized work of literature, the author's intent and the "new critical" interpretation would be the same? If we accept that artists write with 'points' that they want the reader to internalize, this seems to make sense; the "perfect" novel would produce exactly the reaction the author wanted, all the time.
Since the reader can't climb inside the author's mind and figure out what's going on that way, doesn't the "living author" way of thinking have to interpret any 'alternate' interpretations of the work as a failing of the author?
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
No, the point of new criticism was to tear literary theory free from psychoanalysis and its derivatives. Also possibly Marxists. But the rivalries of literary theory are only interesting to literary theorists (and it's been too long since I took those classes to recall the whole mess offhand).
Derrida is also insufferable to read so I'm staying out of that.
That's the thing about new criticism that I really do like. Good works address a multitude of issues - sometimes directly, often ambiguously, sometimes tangentially, and occasionally only because a minor character detail happens to bring it up. Hamlet has interactions between female and male characters; hence, Hamlet (as a work) implicitly means something about gender issues. Lolita takes place in a capitalist society, therefore it must make some kind of claim about economic issues.
Under new criticism, there is nothing that is irrelevant. And this is vitally important as a writer, because it makes you carefully consider the smallest of details, the simplest of diction. Someone, somewhere, will interpret your work in light of what it addresses, even if they're only concerned with the fact that you carelessly used the word "transvestite" once on page 257 and then they go to reinterpret your entire work as having a position on the social status of transvestites. They're probably getting a grade to do this.
But beyond academia the point of new criticism is to allow everyone to find meaning in every text ever written. Not that everyone necessarily will, but they can. Authorial intent limits interpretation, which limits what the text can mean to the reader. What if that reader finds it meaningful in ways the author never intended?
One of my two problems with Death of the Author are its obsession with meaning as the alpha and omega of literature. It has, unfortunately, led to the Death of Poetry in Prose i.e. you can't like a passage just because the language and imagery is stunning, you must find some kind of message in it. Or, rather, you can, but academics will scoff at you disdainfully. Their loss.
The second problem is that authorial intent can and does influence certain messages in a text more than others. Knowing that Twain was being satirical changes how Huck Finn is read (satire is the genre most affected by authorial intent). New criticism likes to pretend that it can come to that conclusion absent any information about the author, but this is sort of like peeking at your opponents hand in poker and then claiming you would have called their bluff anyway.
if you think Ulysses or Hamlet hold forth meaning clearly and explicitly then i question your grasp on reality, let alone literature
an absolute solution to the text is exactly what is absent in Ulysses in particular, and that is largely what makes it so impressive. the author is absent from the text even if you're trying to find him.
"piercing clarity" is not great literature, nor is it authenticity or truth or wisdom. what you find in great literature is complexity, difficulty, ambiguity, uncertainty, contradiction, chaos, multiplicity.
If you've finished reading Ulysses or watching Hamlet thinking "what the hell was the point of that?!", then maybe your contributions to this discussion aren't as valuable as you think they are.
Non sequitur. "Absolute solution" (a term I find questionable in and of itself) and the "author being present in the text" have no connection to one another. What I am arguing for is that a) a text can and does make sense when read, and that b) this sense or meaning is available to the reader.
You seem to argue against the idea that a text can have one, singular interpretation that demands to be universally accepted. At least I assume that's what your "absolute solution"-nonsense is about. Nobody is arguing that, and I would appreciate if you would put up that strawman somewhere else.
Ambiguity is a cheap parlour trick, that anybody with half a brain cell can pull off. It's an inherent quality of language. It takes actual linguistic and narrative skill to employ language in such a way that you can shed most of its inherent ambiguities, contradictions and multiplicities.
The fact that words can mean different things, depending on the context you place them in is a banal and trivial observation.
Aiiie, isn't that a bit harsh?
If you think Hamlet has an "absolute solution," or says something "clearly and explicitly," maybe you could describe what it is as an example?
I'm not sure how much stock to put in this. Language and imagery are "stunning" because they describe or evoke something particularly insightfully, not just because we think certain combinations of roman characters have aesthetic appeal. If the writer uses a bunch of very descriptive language but there isn't much "meaning" there, it probably isn't very good writing.
I guess I'm not really up on the cutting edge of the argument over literary theory, but I never got the impression from my classes that that the author's circumstances were to be just completely dismissed.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Now that's not a piece of fiction, but it is an example of how second-guessing authorial intent based on things outside of the text itself can drastically change your interpretation.
Reading it straight through in the forms most readily available today is madness. Literally. The current english text is schizophrenic at best.
It's only given modern archeology, translational skills, careful analyses of what is known about the when and the where and the why of when various pieces were written that any amount of sense (as opposed to blind faith in the madness) begins to emerge.
In response to Riemann: My guess is that a New Critic would examine it as a work of literature, or a massive anthology of works. The rest of the stuff (political historical etc) would be pushed aside for someone who was interested in it. My uni offers a Bible as lit course and that's pretty much what it is I think, just a literary examination of famous and oft-referenced portions of the bible.