/lit/ - Literature

You're trolling.

>>2805531
And you are a brainwashed sheep who thinks that anyone who challenges his ideas is a troll.

>>2805544

You're still trolling.

>>2805517
Nigga, your grammar is awful.

I for one still care what the author meant. I don't give a flying fuck what literary theorists think.

>>2805560

It's okay to care about what the author thinks. The point of contention is their special authority over meaning.

>>2805555

Absolute truth. There. Objectivity. Now shaddup or provide a more interesting statement than "lolol socialists".

>>2805563
This.
People seem to have this idea that Author Death equates to absolute relativism which it doesn't. It simply allows for interpretation outside of the shadow of the author.

>>2805563
>>2805564
>>2805569
>ignoring the fact that the author should hold the most authority over something he created

Just because human language is tricky and can purposefully or accidentally be misinterpreted doesn't mean we have to curtail the author's power over the artistic direction over his book. If he tries to communicate one thing, and ends up saying something completely different to most people, then that's just shitty writing.

Authors should be measured by how well they convey whatever it is they want to convey. That's better, imo, than just accepting the validity of everyone's opinions and indulging in subjectivity.

Where/how does love fit into your world view, /lit/? Has any one event ever completely shaken your perception of the world or drastically changed your philosophical ideas?

Pic unrelated, but my favourite book of all time.

>>2805587
>implying the author even knows what they're trying to say or what they have actually said

>>2805594
>implying all authors don't write with an intent that is tangible to them
>implying you can tell someone they don't know what they're writing about

>>2805587
What you don't understand is that you don't "accidentaly misinterpret" something. In fact, you can't even say it's a misinterpretation. The thing that lead to concepts like death of the author is that we really don't know what the other means, at any moment, at any given text. The word you use is not the same as the word I read, because the meaning of the words is something we build ourselves and each one of us will get multiple references. The English language is the English language for all, but at a most basic level, everyone has their own language.

Also, not always there is a clear intention behind it. A lot of artists and writers mention they feel their work goes through them and not from them. This is a very common feeling, because they are working on something they observe and sometimes they are so lucid about it, it's like they are just carrying along the message as they write, as if it was an obvious thing, as if it had to be like that. You can't judge on an author's intention. You have to account for the accident and for the charlatan when you realize none of this matters when you read and appreciate reading something.

If you hear from an artist you like that he was just "pretending to be good", how would one react? As another guy said, you might take it into consideration (and you'll read again and feel fooled), but there is no authority and the book remains the same.

>>2805603
Even if that is a given (which it isn't)
>implying the author using more words to explain other words is at all helpful in understanding the original words
You see? The author's explanation is now another text which must be interpreted. This is why they must die.

>>2805606
This is a very superb quality summary of the idea, in my opinion. Art is intended for interpretation. Once it has left the author it belongs to the air and the eyes of the millions.

>>2805606
Well, I considered it a misinterpretation if it did not align with what the author was trying to illustrate.

I know that there are some artists who don't create art with a specific idea in mind, or to communicate anything concrete. It seems like these are the majority of artists actually.

But, like I said, that is their intent. They intended for there not to be a set of didactic ideas that were meant to be interpreted. What I have a problem with is that some critic disagrees, and says, "No, this text obviously shows signs of an author who had a very specific intention in mind."

Yes, the English language (or just, most human languages in general) is very malleable and personal. But art is mainly the expression of an individual, who's personalized use of language is much more precedent than ours since he is the one who wrote the book. What is the fun of stamping your own meaning onto someone else's expression? It seems sort of selfish to me...and even lazy when you realize that it wouldn't hurt to spend time researching the author with whatever material is provided, and using that info to place his art in a appropriate context. The Bible is a perfect example of this.

>>2805608
lol
Why do you see it as "another text that needs to be interpreted", when it obviously is very relevant to the original text?

But seriously, why do you so arbitrarily separate "extraneous" details from the actual book when the two are closely related? What reason is there for this other than cool-and-intelligent-sounding-literary-discussion?

Does it worry anybody else that there are actually people who believe things like what OP wrote? I mean, I have no doubt that OP is a troll, because he's way too obvious, but at the core of every person pretending to be retarded, there's actually a real retard out there.

>>2805560
For someone who claims to reject the theory that the individual reader is what's most important, your own post certainly highlights a decided interest in your own personal views. "I" still care, "I" don't give a flying fuck... How can someone simultaneously be so obviously egocentric, yet still profess a disregard for his own interpretations? Could it be that your self-importance is merely a cover for your own insecurity, and your ardent belief in the correctness of the "single interpretation" is merely a way to try to couch your own opinions in a manner that makes them seem to have some sort of ineffable truth? That you merely wish to project your own interpretation onto the author, so as to somehow give your views more credibility?

>>2805638
*an appropriate

Oh /lit/, do we have to do this every day?

captcha: lolnene QUENTIN.

>>2805683
This is probably the most interesting thing to happen on /lit/ in a week or more. Thanks for starting the debate OP!

Why didn't the author just fly the ring to Mordor?

>>2805686
It seems like one of those interesting things that no one cares to talk about because everyone just keeps repeating: "authorsdeadauthorsdeadauthorsdead".

Not saying there aren't intelligent justifications for it, though. Just that there are too many high schoolers going around and repeating what their teachers told them.

Yes, because when Aristophanes wrote the Lysistrata it was with the intention that in thousands of years, historians would have a means of evaluating how the women of ancient Athens may have lived. If not, it would be absurd to use his works for that purpose.

>>2805716
Probably the most idiotic post in this thread. Congrats. And you're a tripfag, too. Now everytime I see you, I will be like, "Hey, there's the guy who tried to compare historical analysis to literary analysis. What a dumbfuck."

>>2805693
Because Barthes killed him.

>>2805727
>implying they're not comparable
Just like we can analyse ancient literature to develop historical ideas, so can we analyse modern literature for the contemporary, and philosophical, ideas it helps us to create, whether or not the author intended it.

>>2805517
The concept of "death of the author" was not an elimination of the idea of extracting meaning from the text. The "death of the author" idea was meant to stop the concept of placing one limited interpretation of text on a pedestal by claiming it as the author's. In my opinion, it was a bit of an overreaction because there is no reason why one can not simply consider as a thought experiment what the hypothetical author may possibly have meant as one the viewpoints from which one can view meaning, but it was a necessary (over)reaction to the stifling method of interpretation in which only the author's intent mattered.

>>2805761
That makes sense. I sort of figured that it was a reaction to something that had been bothering a lot of modernists.

Although I do wonder what's wrong with there being a single interpretation placed above others? What is particular wrong with the author's intent being supreme, if he wanted it to be that way?

I think it's only "stifling" if you posit that readers' interpretations should be as valuable as the author's. Limits on books aren't imposed by the author asserting what "he meant"; they exist because the book exists, or, if the author wants things to be ambiguous, then they don't.

>>2805809
But why "should" the author have the final say over a text?

What if, for instance, you get some moronic kid who, by sheer chance, writes a work of great genius? Why should that moronic kid who just got lucky be placed over the general public and literary experts when it comes to analysis of the work?

>death of the author

>THE SOCIALISTS!!!!!111

>>>/pol/

>>2805809
The issue arise primarily out of the beauty which one can see in the text. If we have a text ( such as Milton's Lycidas) and I create a new and original interpretive model for the text that allows us to appreciate it in a new way, then we can synthesize that approach with other approaches. Most modern methods of interpretation would be ridiculous if we were to say that the author "meant" for that interpretation. ( Macbeth as symbolic of Nuclear war is an interesting way of looking at things, only an idiot would say that he meant for it to be interpreted that way). So one is left with the choice of 1) Continuing to prize the author's opinion above all else resulting in fights over which interpretation best constitutes the author's interpretation or 2) A system where he can allow multiple viewpoints ( deconstructionist, aestheticism, pragmatism, feminist and marxist critique etc.) without necessarily limiting ourselves only to one of them. Placing one interpretation above all others in really missing the point, not because that interpretation is "bad" or "flawed" but because it is limited.

>>2805832
Well, that would never happen.If he was competent enough to create a masterpiece then he wouldn't be a moron and would mostly likely be able to give sufficient insight into his novel.


I guess what you mean is what if someone's interpretation was better than the author's intent, given that both are adequately supported by ample amounts of evidence from the text itself? My answer will tie into my response to the other poster.

>>2805911

>>2805849
If this is true, then you all seem to value aesthetics over truth, what looks better over what simply exists. This to me is more in line with adding extraneous material to the text. Applying make-up to art so that it is more pleasurable to look at (a good example for that has already been given by you: nuclear Macbeth) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you shouldn’t be able to construe texts in a ways that deviate from the author’s intent, especially if you come up with something that is simply better than what the author’s purpose for the novel, but I do hold the very reason/s for why the novel exists above the secondary interpretations. I still respect the author’s idea, no matter how shitty or good it is, more than that of those who had nothing to do with the story’s creation.

>>2805916
We can go to a black church everyday and see how the preacher makes the New Testament seem like it was written solely for oppressed African Americans struggling in white America. We could do the opposite, go back in time, and observe white slave owners doing the opposite with both testaments, claiming that God valued slavery in the Old Testament and that Jesus was an avid connosseur of the Old Testament. There are thousands of sets of interpretations of the Bible, but there’s only one correct set. And no matter how vague and inexplicable the idea behind the original crafting of the Bible or any other book, the fact still stands that, without it, the book wouldn’t exist in the first place, despite the numerous fanfiction-like theories that thrive off of “evidence” found within it.

>>2805922
You can teach your nuclear war interpretation of MacBeth, but really, what’s the point? Who cares if there was no equality in literary criticism between author and audience? The author did most of the work by writing and putting ideas in an artistic, literary format. Other than your point about beauty, you made it seem like the “death of the author” exists only to cure the butthurt of readers’ who realize that the author’s opinion of the book’s direction should automatically be prized above theirs.

Tldrl; It doesn’t matter if there’s no diversity of literary interpretation. Not everyone is on the “eclecticism for eclecticism’s sake” bandwagon. Unless the authors want his stuff to be vague and open for interpretation, there are only a few truths that exist. Not everyone can be right.

>>2805606 here

>>2805638

Please read me again on that the word is not the same as its meaning. The concepts in the author's head will never align with the words he writes and the words we read never align with the concepts we create for them. Meaning is something that is built from people. Once the author cristalyzes thoughts into words, he may later either revise the text and say "forget about that, this is what I'm saying now" or make an interpretation of his own text as a reader with the same authority of any other reader.

>Well, I considered it a misinterpretation if it did not align with what the author was trying to illustrate.
We are not talking about quality, about wanting to say something, but not having the skills to do it, or reading something and just not getting it. What is hard for a lot of people to grasp is that even when you think you get it right, that is just an illusion, a convention, it is something that worked out but which doesn't make it "correct" because the same rules apply, we still don't see into each other's heads, we can only see each other's use of language and go from there. If an author explains something outside of the book, that is another text to be analyzed, another use of language for you to interpret.

>What is the fun of stamping your own meaning onto someone else's expression?
The thing is, no one is stamping. But all the meaning we get from a book actually come from our understanding of the words. There is no way not to do it.

>>2805924
I think New Criticism is a load of shit, too, but consider this:

These people are interested in the TEXT itself, and how it fits into the larger picture (culture as a whole). If reading B2 of text A has a significance to a group of people, then that is valid in and of itself, regardless if the author intended for B1 to be true.

Consider Exodus in the Bible. I doubt the author(s) of that piece wrote it as a commentary on oppression (rather, it was intended as a "historical"* document and a "don't fuck with the Hebrews, yo" statement). Does this render the significance and impact it had on, say, the Civil Rights movement in the US moot? That significance is based on an interpretation of Exodus.

I think it does have significance, but I heavily disagree with using this notion as the basis for an entire field of academia. It is a complete waste of time and resources.

*Exodus probably never happened in reality.

>>2805954

>It is a complete waste of time and resources.

, he said on 4chan dot org

Would everyone please stop arguing about giraffes? Go to /an/ if you want to talk about that shit.

>>2805924
I'm this poster. >>2805849
I disagree with your refutation. While I would hesitantly value beauty over truth, you are creating a false dichotomy. I think that there is no way to know "truth" in literature, your disagreement with the method of interpretation in which it is clear the author did not intend what is being interpreted ( Macbeth & Nuclear war) is based on the idea that there is a true conception of literature that we are altering by interpreting it in that way. Defining the "true" method of interpretation by what the author says ( or what you think the author says) will result in missing out on almost all of the critical tradition that exists. While I understand that you justify this winnowing of interpretation on the basis that authorial intent represents truth, I would say that the author's conception ( even if it is knowable which I have serious reservations about) can not be said to represent the truth, but rather a truth. I understand fears that "secondary" or "meta" texts or interpretive models will eclipse the text itself or as you see it, the text and the primary interpretive model. I would respond that while I believe that criticism and theory are an integral part of literature to paraphrase Dr. Johnson "I don't think much of someone who has read more theory than literature". So I would agree that interpretation in general should not be more widely read than the base texts themselves, but I would disagree with your conception of a primary text. That said, you seem to have put a lot of thought into this, so I can accept that you may not agree with me as long as you critically consider the issue ( which you have).

You can never trust an artist to tell you what they've done. They can try to tell us, but there's no reason why we should believe them.

>>2805956
I'm not getting paid by the government to post on 4chan.

That's what my day job at the office is for.

>>2805939
I just want it to be known that I agree with you on the looseness of language, though I do think you are exaggerating a little too much.

Despite all of the vague abstraction that pervade literature, there actually are plenty of mutual uses of objective language that authors use so that the we are all on the same page. True, we will never know the exact emotional state of mind of him during the writing process, but it's not like the "meaning" he wrote, or the intent can't be condensed to a few objective, factual statements that could be understood by everyone. And this, even though it in a sense can never be fully understood or experienced as the author felt it, is what I'm after.

In the face of the nebulousness of language, given that yes, people do create their own meaning from other people's idea, I believe that art is an act of self expression that gives us more of an opportunity to focus on the way that certain artist sees the world than how we see it, even though we are looking at it through our biased perception. Instead of basking in our own minds and accepting the pervasive subjectivity of things, the goal should be to rise above our own experiences and try to understand the world of the artist, since what he created is indubitably a part of him.

>>2806018

>What is the fun of stamping your own meaning onto someone else's expression?

Let me rephrase that sentence since I may have caused confusion with using the word, "stamp". I meant to say that I find no satisfaction in being provided with a text, and being told that, with the proper amount of evidence, I am free to shape it into whatever is coooooool to me.

Why is recognizing the subjectivity of your human perception, and doing your best to to transcend it in hopes of understanding someone else no better than simply indulging in the seemingly indefatigable recesses of biased human consciousness and allowing others to do it?

>>2806020
You are not free to shape it into whatever you want. You are inevitably going to shape it into what you think it is all about.

Subjectivity recognizes this. Objectivity will still fall for the illusion that you may read a text without changing it as you read it. Reading it is shaping it.

And I perfectly understand that some interpretations rustle your jimmies, because that happends to me too. Except that is also an interpretation, our interpretation. The meaning that to one guy is obvious, to the other is bullshit and vice-versa. You may buy my argument for my interpretation or not.

>>2806018
>>2806020
I'm this>>2805979 poster.
On the issue of language, I think that there are agreements that can be reached as to a meaning, but that these agreements do not necessarily eliminate other meanings. For example if I was to write "The dog went to the store" we can all agree that the sentence means that a canine traveled to some sort of store. That is we can all agree on the literal. The issue is that you see the fundamental and necessary agreement on meaning in language to preclude other interpretation. I would agree that anyone who disputes that the literal is incorrect would be an idiot, but that going off of that, stating that the literal ( the agreed upon linguistic meaning) is the only interpretation, or even the only "correct" interpretation is making the same error. As for the issue of seeing the genuflection to authorial intent as a way to eliminate the fear of creating a "personal" meaning that is necessarily subjective, I would say that the solution is not eliminating your own opinion and placing the author's interpretation above all else, the correct method is to listen to the author's opinion/ intent, listen to your own intent, and try to synthesize the best out of both of these. Forming your own conclusions free from the influence of others is only idiotic in so far as it precludes allowing other valid or perhaps better interpretations to be allowed. The key is keeping an open mind and putting things in context.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUTyEEiulQk

>>2806018

>Despite all of the vague abstraction that pervade literature, there actually are plenty of mutual uses of objective language that authors use so that the we are all on the same page.

Cite one.

>True, we will never know the exact emotional state of mind of him during the writing process, but it's not like the "meaning" he wrote, or the intent can't be condensed to a few objective, factual statements that could be understood by everyone.

The meaning he wrote and the meaning he intended are not the same thing.

>And this, even though it in a sense can never be fully understood or experienced as the author felt it, is what I'm after.

Then why read the literature? You can't simply get away with researching the author's commentary on his work, and it's effectively the same thing from your standpoint. There's no reason to waste your time reading it yourself, when all you want are the 'few objective statements' describing the author's supposed intention.

>In the face of the nebulousness of language, given that yes, people do create their own meaning from other people's idea, I believe that art is an act of self expression that gives us more of an opportunity to focus on the way that certain artist sees the world than how we see it, even though we are looking at it through our biased perception.

Then again, there is no need to actually read any work. If what you're after is the artists point of view alone, and not your own or a synthesis of the two, there is positively no point in reading the work.

>>2806058

>Instead of basking in our own minds and accepting the pervasive subjectivity of things, the goal should be to rise above our own experiences and try to understand the world of the artist, since what he created is indubitably a part of him.

Strawman. No literary analyst is this egotistical and passes courses.

>Why is recognizing the subjectivity of your human perception, and doing your best to to transcend it in hopes of understanding someone else no better than simply indulging in the seemingly indefatigable recesses of biased human consciousness and allowing others to do it?

Please dumb this down for me. I have no idea what you're saying.

I'm not the guy you've been talking with, by the way. I just wanted to jump into the ring.

>>2806058

You can simply get away*

There cannot be knowledge which isn't biased.
There cannot be a word that is as solid as real life.
There cannot be a reading if not a personal one.

It's not a choice. Try to do it otherwise and you'll fail. There is no reason to be mad when something differ from what we think, even if we feel with all our hearts that it is stupid. Still, it's your word against his. There is no need to shout, because not everyone will listen. Ever.

So we talk about books, we do the best we can to be lucid and understand how we get to the feeling we felt, to the thought that emerged, to the idea that sparkled. We reason, we make cross-references, we argument. We create more texts for others to read.

If you think you're doing anything more than that, and that you are closer than others towards this great meaning of something, then you're just delusional.

This is just my opinion of course, and my opinion predicts that some will disagree, so I'm not even mad.

>>2806090
>This is just my opinion of course
A very bad and misguided one, if one may comment.

>>2806100
Yes, please, comment away. Thanks for your input.

1. the author can lie
2. the author can be insane
3. the author can physically be dead
4. the author doesn't actually exist (ie in the case of homer, according to some interpretations)
5. also, there can be multiple authors of a work (and if each author has different authors, who has more authority?)
6. what the author(s) meant can change over time (think of religious texts)
7. the author may wish to leave the interpretation to the readers

in all cases, the authority is deferred to the text itself. if there is no evidence in the actual text, how can the author claim any authority? the text itself is the sole provider of meaning, and if you are too lazy and stupid to look at the text to find it's meaning, by all means, go ahead and listen to the author, if you can. everyone else can have the mental capacity to decide for themselves what a text means.