Personally, I’ve long been of the opinion that Death of the Author is, if not exactly wrong, still an idea which has been more harmful than useful with respect to its effects on literary criticism.
The central idea of Death of the Author is to judge the text itself without limiting interpretation to that which is imposed by the author’s intentions. There are certainly cases where one can glean valuable information from a text which the author did not consciously choose to add to their work. For instance, the author might have views on race which will leak out into their writing, in such a way that a perceptive reader will gain insight about their views even though the author did not intend to make any sort of statement about race whatsoever. However, I think that to divorce the text entirely from the context of its creation is an invitation to abuse the basic principles of communication.
As Roland Barthes put it, “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” But imposing limits on a text is necessary in order to extract any information from it at all. It’s only by narrowing down our space of the possible referents that we can distinguish the meaning of “an indictment of Roland Barthes” from “oogabooga.”
A text has no inherent meaning, so it makes no sense to judge “the text itself” divorced from the context that granted it meaning in the first place. Obviously, we didn’t need to wait for Barthes to come along in order to realize “hey, we can gain information about the social norms of the ancient Greeks by reading the Iliad which Homer never realized he was putting in there in the first place!” When we do this, information is being conveyed from the writers of the text to us, because the narrowness that we and the author mutually impose on the text carries more information than the author was conscious of. But if you decide, for example, “Hey, I can interpret “The Faerie Queene” as a narrative of the history of Communism!” information is not being conveyed. You might as well be spending your time deciding what clouds look like.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
This is at the notion level, but I’m wondering where the meaning of a text is.
Candidate theories: In the mind of the author. Readers are constructing (whether consciously or not) models of what the author had in mind.
In the minds of readers. People have access to the mind of at most one reader.
But that’s limited fun for some kinds of analysis, so critics are apt to make guesses about the minds of a great many readers.
I have respect for a professor (sorry, name and university forgotten) who asked people what they loved about the Lord of the Rings, and why they read it repeatedly. The consensus answer was the moment when Sauron’s power fell.
Until I wrote this, I didn’t realize that this is an example of successful authorial intention—Tolkien thought eucatastrophe was crucial.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
For fictional texts, I’m not sure that extracting information from the text is really the best way of thinking about the text-reader interaction.
The “Wizard of Oz” movie is allegedly very influential in gay culture in America. Assuming this is true, I find it implausible that this was the intent of a movie made in 1939. Does that show that the movie can’t “mean” something about gay culture?
Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether there’s any value to be gotten from reading fiction, and if so what it is that one is getting of value.
Which might in turn raise the question of whether it’s possible to get that thing-of-value from nonfiction as well, in which case perhaps extracting information from the text is perhaps not the only way to engage with nonfiction, either.
It was useful at the time. Remember that postmodernisms are reactions against modernisms, and reactions date badly. There are few good ideas that can’t be made into bad ideas by overdoing them hard enough.
Personally, I’ve long been of the opinion that Death of the Author is, if not exactly wrong, still an idea which has been more harmful than useful with respect to its effects on literary criticism.
The central idea of Death of the Author is to judge the text itself without limiting interpretation to that which is imposed by the author’s intentions. There are certainly cases where one can glean valuable information from a text which the author did not consciously choose to add to their work. For instance, the author might have views on race which will leak out into their writing, in such a way that a perceptive reader will gain insight about their views even though the author did not intend to make any sort of statement about race whatsoever. However, I think that to divorce the text entirely from the context of its creation is an invitation to abuse the basic principles of communication.
As Roland Barthes put it, “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” But imposing limits on a text is necessary in order to extract any information from it at all. It’s only by narrowing down our space of the possible referents that we can distinguish the meaning of “an indictment of Roland Barthes” from “oogabooga.”
A text has no inherent meaning, so it makes no sense to judge “the text itself” divorced from the context that granted it meaning in the first place. Obviously, we didn’t need to wait for Barthes to come along in order to realize “hey, we can gain information about the social norms of the ancient Greeks by reading the Iliad which Homer never realized he was putting in there in the first place!” When we do this, information is being conveyed from the writers of the text to us, because the narrowness that we and the author mutually impose on the text carries more information than the author was conscious of. But if you decide, for example, “Hey, I can interpret “The Faerie Queene” as a narrative of the history of Communism!” information is not being conveyed. You might as well be spending your time deciding what clouds look like.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
This is at the notion level, but I’m wondering where the meaning of a text is.
Candidate theories: In the mind of the author. Readers are constructing (whether consciously or not) models of what the author had in mind.
In the minds of readers. People have access to the mind of at most one reader.
But that’s limited fun for some kinds of analysis, so critics are apt to make guesses about the minds of a great many readers.
I have respect for a professor (sorry, name and university forgotten) who asked people what they loved about the Lord of the Rings, and why they read it repeatedly. The consensus answer was the moment when Sauron’s power fell.
Until I wrote this, I didn’t realize that this is an example of successful authorial intention—Tolkien thought eucatastrophe was crucial.
For fictional texts, I’m not sure that extracting information from the text is really the best way of thinking about the text-reader interaction.
The “Wizard of Oz” movie is allegedly very influential in gay culture in America. Assuming this is true, I find it implausible that this was the intent of a movie made in 1939. Does that show that the movie can’t “mean” something about gay culture?
Could you taboo “mean?”
Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether there’s any value to be gotten from reading fiction, and if so what it is that one is getting of value.
Which might in turn raise the question of whether it’s possible to get that thing-of-value from nonfiction as well, in which case perhaps extracting information from the text is perhaps not the only way to engage with nonfiction, either.
It was useful at the time. Remember that postmodernisms are reactions against modernisms, and reactions date badly. There are few good ideas that can’t be made into bad ideas by overdoing them hard enough.