That’s because it’s late and I used a word with exactly the opposite meaning I was reaching for. The sentiment I was trying to get at was the author’s emphasis on debt as it impacts a doctoral candidate, (as opposed to, say, a blue collar worker who has to moonlight in a petrol station to cover their loan repayments), does not bode well for the idea of divorcing an author’s personal opinions and circumstances from the interpretations of their work.
The way my friend has always described Death of the Author (we lived together at University, so I’ve been treated to this for a while) suggests he has been subject to a much, much stronger form than the one you describe, in which an author’s motives, intentions and circumstances should be completely disregarded when interpreting their work.
(I recall he once wrote a poem which, in a pleasantly Godelian fashion, described his own motives and intentions while writing it. He hoped one day to become famous enough as a poet that English undergrads would be forced to try and analyse it without reference to his motives and intentions for the piece. There’s a reason we’ve remained friends for so long.)
Coming at it from an information theoretic perspective, Moby Dick is clearly not talking about the Soviet Union’s occupation of post-war East Germany. Part of my certainty in that statement involves facts about the knowledge and history of the author (most saliently that he wrote the book, and died, in the 19th Century). Any implementation of Death of the Author strong enough to say “that doesn’t matter: Ahab is totally Stalin” is not an implementation I can really get behind.
That’s because it’s late and I used a word with exactly the opposite meaning I was reaching for. The sentiment I was trying to get at was the author’s emphasis on debt as it impacts a doctoral candidate, (as opposed to, say, a blue collar worker who has to moonlight in a petrol station to cover their loan repayments), does not bode well for the idea of divorcing an author’s personal opinions and circumstances from the interpretations of their work.
The way my friend has always described Death of the Author (we lived together at University, so I’ve been treated to this for a while) suggests he has been subject to a much, much stronger form than the one you describe, in which an author’s motives, intentions and circumstances should be completely disregarded when interpreting their work.
(I recall he once wrote a poem which, in a pleasantly Godelian fashion, described his own motives and intentions while writing it. He hoped one day to become famous enough as a poet that English undergrads would be forced to try and analyse it without reference to his motives and intentions for the piece. There’s a reason we’ve remained friends for so long.)
Coming at it from an information theoretic perspective, Moby Dick is clearly not talking about the Soviet Union’s occupation of post-war East Germany. Part of my certainty in that statement involves facts about the knowledge and history of the author (most saliently that he wrote the book, and died, in the 19th Century). Any implementation of Death of the Author strong enough to say “that doesn’t matter: Ahab is totally Stalin” is not an implementation I can really get behind.