Roald Barthes’s 1967 critical essay “The Death of the Author” addresses the influence of the author in reading and in analyzing his or her writing, the power of the reader, and the option to ignore the work’s background and focus solely on the work. When critically looking at writing, the author is forced to take sole responsibility for the work. Whether the audience loves or hates, whether critics think it is genius or failure. With this idea the creator’s work has a direct correlation to the creator himself or herself, which according to Barthes seems to take away from the text. In other words, the information not stated within the work defines the work. The historical and biographical elements culminate into a limitation of interpreting the text. Barthes goes on to discuss the text itself appearing as derivative, saying that all texts from a certain era will be read the same due to the cultivation of a culture. The direct intent of the author may be muddled due to the translation from author to text to reader, with the text becoming more of a dictionary than anything else. This point ultimately leads to Barthes’s main point: the reader holds more responsibility to the text than does the author. The complexity of different experiences that come from the author into the text is flattened when it is read. The reader comes blindly and has no personal connection to the text. So much information is condensed and made inaccessible to the viewer. Barthes makes the point that a work may begin with the author, but its last stop is with the reader. Michel Foucault, who wrote “What Is An Author,” never defines what an author is exactly; instead he identifies the author by the way in which that author exists. Because he takes this outlook,... ... middle of paper ... ...h is a mail-order bride who moves halfway across the country would be very off-putting. At the same time, the reader must also focus on the text and not form an analysis solely based of the fact that the novel takes place in the late 19th century. Also, if one reads the lovely sonnets of the romantic poets, it helps to know for whom the poems are written. Keats writes “Bright Star” for his lovely Fanny Browne. Lord Byron focuses on his beloved Mary Haworth, whose perfection inspired many of his poems. Even Shelley, whose torrid love affairs were legendary, created many famous sonnets. One cannot form a successful critique of any work without knowing the historical information from which the works were produced or the biographical information of the author. Doing so, is only a disservice to the text and the reader will not be able to fully understand nor critique it.
Knowing about the writer of a literary text can shape significantly the way that it is read. Consider the effect of the writer’s context on your understanding of The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.
All people think differently, and see things in different ways. Seymour gross wrote “Solitude, and Love, and Anguish”: The Tragic Design of The Scarlet Letter. Gross’s article that experience, understanding of tone, and deep thought, play a vital role when analyzing a novel, or any piece of writing.
Is Michel Foucault a historian or not? At the beginning of the analysis on Foucault’s historical analysis, what should be acknowledged is that none of Foucault’s works refer to his previous ones and every work is based upon a new construction of theory and method which shakes the standard norms of history writing and put his methods under suspicion by some historians. On the other hand, many others favor his work; because of Foucault’s specific approach, Gutting calls him as an ‘intellectual artisan’ who was an expert of producing intellectual equivalents of material objects and especially three kinds of them which are history, theory and myth. (Gutting 1996, 3-6) Thomas Flynn answers this question by claiming that Foucault’s all major works are histories of a
...m must fall short of the original. And if his talent cannot be used to add to the glory of the classics, then it might as well be used to condemn the moderns. If all writing is ultimately a corruption of that which preceded it, as the narrator seems to believe, then it is better to write of something that is despised rather than revered.
In addition, authors frequently lack originality and simply take the reader on all-too-familiar voyages into politics, morals, or religion. Successful writers are those who risk and go on to write about topics that many times others have been less willing to address. The product of these extraordinary efforts is compositions richly enhanced by human feelings and real problems that we encounter and relate to our everyday lives…thought-provoking discussions about religion, philosophy, or politics. These pioneering authors are not afraid to write about evil, the perverse aspects of man, or even sexuality… Their true voices have risen from behind the words taking shape in the minds of the readers. Few have done this, but in the 19th Century two remarkable Americans produced compositions of unequal quality. Their styles and the way they approach the reader are different from t...
... “the emergence of ownership and l strict copyright rules” (p.1628). Foucault recognises that “the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature” (p.1628). The fundamental problem with this is the inability to define what should be classed as literature. One cannot place so much emphasis on the creator over the creation. Do we class all the published works by Shakespeare as literature? If tomorrow, an unpublished work of his was discovered, would that automatically become classed as worthwhile by default? If a letter cannot have an author, just a signatory then what writings by an author can be classed as literature? As the author’s name became an intrinsic part of literature, so did the restrictions surrounding an author’s work.
What if Aristotle had been a writer in today’s world his ideas would have been repressed and in America we are not open anymore to free interpretations and expressionism. We are a very individualistic society, but don’t practice it when we refer to “oh those writers.” Our fellow country men’s repression of ideas and the writing endeavor forced men like Baldwin, who was on the extreme of being black and writer led to him needing salvation in Europe from our group think and materialistic society. Writers want to find a place where they don’t have to use “habit of flexing his muscles and proving that he is just a “regular guy” that he realizes how crippling this have has been” (139). We have stagnated the intellectual curiosity of millions of Americans for many years.
...e speaker admits she is worried and confused when she says, “The sonnet is the story of a woman’s struggle to make choices regarding love.” (14) Her mind is disturbed from the trials of love.
In the history of written literature, it is difficult not to notice the authors who expand their reader's style and manner of reading. Some write in an unusual syntax which forces the reader to utilize new methods of looking at a language; others employ lengthy allusions which oblige the reader to study the same works the author drew from in order to more fully comprehend the text. Some authors use ingenious and complicated plots which warrant several readings to be understood. But few authors have used all these and still more devices to demand more of the reader. James Joyce, writer of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, uses extraordinarily inventive and intricate plot construction, creative and often thought-provoking word constructions, allusions to works both celebrated and recondite, and complex issues and theories when challenging his readers to expand their method of reading.
Furthermore, it is also the telling and not simply the stories that help Didion to find her “first person narrative” in new contexts and critical manifestations (self-involvement). According to the French semiotician Roland Barthes: “ As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins […] The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us”.
Just as the authors’ Judeo-Christian God created man in his own image, Proust and Descartes fashion their creator-narrators as themselves—Marcel, as Proust, a writer in search of complete description (the expression of complete feeling); the Meditator, as Descrates, a thinker in search of complete knowledge. The authors are the self-referential sources of their narrators’ (and of their own) quests for truth. In this way, from their ideas of truth and of themselves, both Proust and Descartes, indeed, conceive their own
“In my estimation a good book first must contain little or no trace of the author unless the author himself is a character. That is, when I read the book I should not feel that someone is telling me the story but t...
Foucault 's essay “What is an author” explores the relationship between author, text, and reader. Foucaults essay seems to be an implicit response to Barthes 's famous essay "The Death of the Author." as Foucault argues that the issue of the disappearance or death of the author has not been developed sufficiently, and needs further consideration, beginning with the clarification of what constitutes a “work.” Foucault wants to discuss the relationship between an author and a text, and the manner in which the text points to the author as a figure who is outside the text, and who precedes it. Foucault draws upon the function of the author to provide a discourse of the difference between an author and a writer, and whether or not such a characterisation
During the time-period when they authored this essay, the commonly held notion amongst people was that “In order to judge the poet’s performance, we must know what he intended.”, and this notion led to what is termed the ‘Intentional fallacy’. However, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the intention, i.e., the design or plan in the author’s mind, of the author is neither available nor desirable for judging the success of a work of literary art. It is not available because the author will most certainly not be beside the reader when he/she reads the text, and not desirable because intention as mentioned already is nothing but the author’s attitude towards his work, the way he felt while writing the text and what made him write that particular piece of writing and these factors might distract the reader from deciphering the meaning from the text. This method of reading a text without any biographical or historical background of either the poem or the poet practiced by the New Critics was known as ‘Closed Reading’. This stemmed from their belief in the autonomy of the text.
Literary criticism is used as a guideline to help analyze, deconstruct, interpret, or even evaluate literary works. Each type of criticism offers its own methods that help the reader to delve deeper into the text, revealing all of its innermost features. New Criticism portrays how a work is unified, Reader-Response Criticism establishes how the reader reacts to a work, Deconstructive Criticism demonstrates how a work falls apart, Historical Criticism illustrates how the history of the author and the author’s time period influence a text, and last of all, Psychological Criticism expresses how unconscious motivations drive the author in the creation of their work as well as how the reader’s motivations influence their own interpretation of the text (Lynn 139, 191). This creates a deep level of understanding of literature that simply cannot be gained through surface level reading. If not one criticism is beneficial to the reader, then taking all criticisms or a mixture of specific criticisms into consideration might be the best way to approach literary