/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6084584]

Can someone please explain 'Death of the Author' to me? It's challenging my notions of literature so much that I can't think properly.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6084663]

The author is a product of society, literature is merely a certain facet of society in a time and place speaking through the author.

Art demands interpretation, if there's no interpretation, then it's not art, it's purely propaganda.

Reading a work is interfacing between the reader and the work, the reader is not just a passive recipient of the author's expression, the reader too finds a place for his expression in the work, otherwise he's just le wine sipping bourgeois guy

[Anonymous No.6084675]

>>6084663

[Anonymous No.6084741]

Do you guys think 'The Room' could be argued as a legitimately good film using Barthes' thesis? As a comedy, it's great. As a drama, it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Does his intention of creating a drama make a difference?

[Anonymous No.6084746]

The meaning of literature is independent of the authors intent.

If I write "the walls were green" and then insist that the meaning the reader was supposed to take away is that the walls are pink, I am wrong. The intent of the author does not matter in what can be and is interpreted in a work of art.

[Anonymous No.6084754]

>>6084746
Any counterarguments to this, though?

[Anonymous No.6084807]

>>6084754
considering the author's intent and biography as part of the text is a starting point for getting over the DoTA nonsense

>If I write "the walls were green" and then insist that the meaning the reader was supposed to take away is that the walls are pink, I am wrong.
this is an extreme case that does not properly conclude that an author's intent is in all cases irrelevant.

[Anonymous No.6084820]

>>6084741
the fact it's completely serious is the funniest part about it. Tommy Wiseau is a genuine accidental genius.

[Anonymous No.6084825]

It's a line of thought originating among literary critics to the effect that only literary critics understand the true meaning of words, regardless of lame protestations of authors and other plebs to the contrary.

[Anonymous No.6084859]

from Barthes' essay

>The Author,when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate;there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.

>Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is “explained:’ the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even “new criticism”) should be overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, “threaded” (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning.

It's about much more than 'irrelevance of author's intent,' which is the subject of Wimmsatt & Beardsley's 'The Intentional Fallacy.'

[Anonymous No.6084867]

Read Barthes, Cavell, Hix, and Kolsti

[Anonymous No.6084879]

>>6084754

Uhh sure.

If I wrote the walls are green and my story was about medieval knights fucking in a dungeon and some dipshit reader interpreted it as the walls were pink they missed my obvious allusion to Gawain and the Green Knight and my take on the homoerotic tones in the work.

Meanwhile the reader is wanking off further into their own solipsism.

[Anonymous No.6084883]

>>6084807
>>6084879
Well, works written as a counterpoint to Barthes.
>>6084867
Full names, I googled Cavell and got an ice cream company.

[Anonymous No.6084889]

>>6084879
Perhaps interpreting the texts as "the walls are pink" would be an intentionally insightful way of sensing the latent homoeroticism in your work.

[Anonymous No.6084900]

>>6084889
Fuck, that wasn't my intention though. This shit is messy.

[Anonymous No.6084901]

>>6084883

Stanley Cavell

[Anonymous No.6084915]

>>6084879
>>6084889
>>6084900
I think you guys are missing the point. A more accurate title for Barthe's essay would have been "Death of the Author as God" or "DotA as sole Authority".

It was directed more at literary criticisms than it was at actual authors. The point is that all interpretations are valid, even if they contradict authorial intent. The "correct" interpretation is, of course, still up for debate; Barthes was just arguing that a statement made by the author outside of the text does not necessarily preclude the validity of contradictory interpretations.

[Anonymous No.6084920]

Just more pretentious French pomo schlock.

[Anonymous No.6086204]

>>6084754
Foucault's essay about the author figure is a critique of Barthes.