"Death of the author" is a stupid idea

You can't just pretend the author has nothing at all to do with what is written. Even if you tried you are consciously aware that the author exists.

The best fiction feels as if the reader is the story experience: Window Pane prose. If the author context is needed the story doesn't stand on it's own, and should be rewritten.

disgustingly reddit

Who's pretending that? Nobody. You should read Barthes so you know a bit about what you intend to critique.

>I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about but I'll talk anyway

>In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity—their political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes—to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text".

>posting frog
>mentioning reddit
the irony!

not an argument

It was more of a comment, really.

In the framework outlined in How to Read a Book, the author matters when you read analytically; you "come to terms" with the author. When you read syntopically, the author matter less; you "bring the authors to terms".

It just depends on what your goals are. Both are valid ways to read.

>people openly defending death of the author

wow I bet you guys are the most popular ones of your social groups

>The presence of the author should never be ignored
The problem is assuming you actually have a got shot at his intentions.

Authorial intent itself is just interpretation on your part.

t. aspiring prom queen

But if you adhere strictly to what makes sense given the author's biography, then you're constraining your set of readings. Often times the art of ideologues shows the flaws of their ideologies, for instance, but strict adherence to authorial intent would negate these readings.

Furthermore, your understanding of the author's biography may be faulty, either because you haven't done enough research or because there isn't enough reading material to develop a rigorous understanding of their inner selves. Many authors' public and private lives, for example, are wildly different, and, though it will be much easier to get a grip on their public selves, it's the private selves which did the writing.

Also,

you know girls love postmodernism, right?

no they don't

Or maybe you just arent an empathic person.
If you cant connect with a great work of art then maybe the fault lies in you and not the author.

I mean sure death of an author is all good if you are just reading for leasure. If you want to run in academia,legit academia and not some cluster fuck post modern mess masturbation circle then considering a work in the context of the author is primary . Couching the illiad or ts elliots wasteland in nu wave feminism is strictly undergrad tier.

Theres more to it than just that.

critical theories like marxist theory that like to pick apart the author and the ideas behind a text is fine and all, but its definitely less fun to read like that. sometimes its more emotional to read the text and feel with the story rather than to understand its ideas.

>no arguments
nice
>Couching the illiad or ts elliots wasteland in nu wave feminism is strictly undergrad tier.
Being against ideological interpretations and mentioning TS Elliot in the same sentence is pretty fucking rich

>If you want to run in academia,legit academia and not some cluster fuck post modern mess masturbation circle then considering a work in the context of the author is primary
t. autodidact

Brainlet here trying to summarize what "Death of the Author" means. Tell me how much I understand.

The author is irrelevant because the text that he conjures is unoriginal and is derived from knowledge millennia ago, therefore a text's purpose is to serve as factory for individual interpretations.

How'd I do, boys?

shitpost

Multiple approaches to interpret a text aren't mutually exclusive, they can even coexist in the same analysis. The idea of a singular truth about a text is untenable in contemporary literary theory.

>posts picture of woman cooking
...what in the author's biography can elucidate what he meant by this...

It's nothing to do with the process of writing. It's an interpretive device only. Most folks who advocate death of the author will concede that there is thought and originality that goes into writing, and that it's easy to see most authors in their work. The real definition is something like:
>We should read each text without paying attention to what the author says (or would likely say) it means. The text exists independent of the author.
A good example of this is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien is on-record as having said that allegories are stupid and his work has no deeper meaning, but it's very easy to read LOTR as racial allegory, and many right-wingers love doing this. That's death of the author in a nutshell.

Death of the Author is about literature signifying in spite of authorial intention, drawing attention to a sort of "semantic unconscious". The title is provocative. Barthes deems the importance of authorial intention is reduced, not eliminated. If god is dead and with it fixed signifiers, why not the author?

Death of the author is an interesting idea if you're not plebeian enough to use it as an absolute and never consider the author. Because life is never, ever as simple and binary as philosophy and literary theories would tell you.

Death of the author means that the oeuvre can go beyond its author. It doesn't mean that oeuvres exist as pure theoretical objects that into being thanks to the Holy Spirit.

youre totally misunderstanding. Thats pretty much the opposite of what Marxist Critics do

I have bad news for you user: every Lit department in the world is post-structuralist/post-modernist. Kermode and Bloom are openly mocked for daring to suggest that reading King lear might have some value beyond its use as a crutch to wax political

He's conflating Marxist criticism and Psychoanalytical criticism, but they're both present in critical theory.

>the irony!

pretty arty girls do

You might want to read Freud's interpretation of Jensen.

Books are rated astonishingly higher if the author committed suicide rather than succumbing to a natural death.

This ugly girl is cute!

But that leads to stupid things like Rowling tweeting that Dumbledore is gay and Hermione is black.

fug i miss her

This doesn't need to be defended. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn't meant to be refuted, they are to be ignored. Some things are so obvious, and others so retarded, there's no need to debate them.

Thinking that way is easy, when you don't dare to read about or approach things outside your nice little bubble. It's all just obvious and retarded, amirite?

>It's another useless "I heard the term death of the author and I'm pretty sure what it means just from the term itself and also I don't like it" thread

"What's the value of King Lear" is such a meaningless avenue to explore. The avenues of meaning are far richer territory, because otherwise study of literature boils down to "x is good. Got it?" You open up the text to a greater variety of discourse if you instead ask "what does it do? How does it do it? What is it saying?" The irony is Bloom values these questions himself, just read Anxiety of Influence (whose main thesis is just as radical as any Marxist reading). You won't educate yourself in actual criticism though cause you're a pretentious parroting pseud.

Though I don't want to leave off this bitterly so I'll just recommend Yale's series of lectures on lit theory that you can find on YouTube.

This. Also, why does this keep happening? It's not like random ill-educated anons regularly take uninformed potshots at Russian Formalism or reception theory.

Go ahead and explain what it means to use then.

If knowledge of the author outside the work presented is necessary to understand it, then the work is a failure.

educate yourself bucko

Just because the other poster doesn't know what it means, doesn't mean he's lying.

Because it's one of those scary boogeyman like postmodernism which in the nu-lit weltanschauung you can dismiss without even engaging with it because it's simbly too sdupid, man ;)

I interpret op's post as sarcasm.

see

I agree wholeheartedly OP

always agreed with this

>its another ribbit vs reddit episode

not really

a marxist critique would pick apart the ideology, the ideology with the author thats present in the text

dipshit

>"Death of the author" is a stupid idea.
No it's not, because the critic is the true artist.

Everything gives invaluable context to what you are reading. Knowing what a tree is, or that the author was dying of cancer as he penned the words on the page. DotA, in a narrow didactic sense, is a very reasonable idea that authorial intent should not be supreme among contexts and, which is more important, you are not a very good judge of intent. Otherwise you end up treating Borges' bibliography as a weird coping mechanism re: sexual misfortune and immature inceldom, explaining Russian literary tradition as "duh it's cold outside and also cold = unhappy".

Also DotA is great because most good art today is outsider art and there author supremacy will fuck you over.

Read the article.

Did you just see this phrase and decided to consider it at face value? Read the fucking text, it's not about outright ignoring the context or the author. Jesus Christ.

It says right on wikipedia "argues that writing and creator are unrelated." The author and the book are clearly related though.

>It says right on wikipedia
Not the same user, but Jesus Christ, at least try to make yourself look clever. It's not even a long or inaccessible article.

Everything has everything to do with everything. What makes the author more relevant to the interpretations of any given text than Spinosaurid biomechanics?

>It says right on Wikipedia
Holy cannoli... is this the power of Veeky Forums, the most intellectual board of Veeky Forums?

I think user's rusing. I hope user's rusing.

>wikipedia is a bad source

Stop trying so hard

you insolent audacity is disgusting

explain

I agree with you in some aspects.
However theres a difference between interpreting a work like looking for racial connotations in LOTR which to my understanding has also been explained away by the the historical milieu Tolkien was around in.
And synthesizing ideas to make a new work of art to be interpreted.
The intentions of "meme artists" are less serious than any classical painting , but they still make art.

It just sounds to me that there's a difference between looking for propaganda and making propaganda.

She can say that all she wants but time travelling doesnt exists and we are all still on a timeline where when she originally published the work hermoiny was white and dumbledore made some strong personal attachments.

So what critics shall i read then eh?
And how should i interpret them eh?

And when there is no "presence of the author"? If you come across an anonymously written piece, are you saying it cannot be interpreted because you can't look into the author? What about something like Works and Days, where we have multiple inconsistent manuscripts, which form the only real basis for what Hesiod would have wanted or would have said about the text? How can you pick which ones are most accurate in absence of information other than the text you're using to make that determination?

I somhow feel that DotA was just some scheme to justify selling more books, once more shitty art.
That why you have artists today putting so little thought into their craft.
I mean the height being Pollack and even then he didnt care about form or texture. Artists and artists of their ilk are like "people are gonna take meaning out of this and thats going to matter more than the rffort i put into it, so fuck it ill just paint thid big fucking swatch of red and just make friends with all the ideologues of my time so they can push my name. "

This reasoning is dangerous to the artist.
Maybe PoMo art is really a protest and not an acceptance of PoMo thinking.

I mean DotA has the gall to imply that you can look at a piece of shit like a cristmas ham if you are hungry enough. If thats the case why dont we all just start eating shit.

Unless you are going to cherry pick the first sentence that explains what death of the author is then i am waiting for other anons who have read the actual work to explain how wiki misses its mark. Id pick it up but im currently busy with other things.
Theres a difference between making an educated guess based on empiral evidence and historical anecdote as opposed to just throwing shit out there.

>Theres a difference between making an educated guess based on empiral evidence and historical anecdote as opposed to just throwing shit out there.
Which has nothing to do with DoTA. Answer the question. If information about the author is impossible to obtain for whatever reason, are you saying that a literary work cannot be interpreted? And if not, then how are you not engaging in DoTA?

>too dumb to get behind or even understand death of an author
wow I bet you have pictures of frogs on your harddrive too

We can still gather contextual clues. Like translating the language of said story carbon dating said work.
And put a mindful effort into making an accurate interpretation rather than just claiming that "works and days" is really a science fiction story set 500 years in the future from when it was written. And no one can say otherwise.

Care to correct us then?

>We can still gather contextual clues. Like translating the language of said story carbon dating said work.
None of which tells us about the author as an individual, what sort of biases and pressures he's working from. Is Hesiod really trying to reform a wayward brother? Is he using it as an allegory for why men should work for a living rather than hedonistically squatting? Is the myth of Pandora something he literally believed or just a story to be taken in some metaphorical context?
>IT WAS WRITTEN AROUND 700 BC! THAT MAKES THE ANSWERS CLEAR!!!

Your entire methodology IS DoTA, just without realizing it. You are trying to reconstruct a text's meaning based on information other than what the author is telling you.

>And put a mindful effort into making an accurate interpretation rather than just claiming that "works and days" is really a science fiction story set 500 years in the future from when it was written. And no one can say otherwise.
Are you deliberately misunderstanding DoTA (Ironic given what you just said), or are you just clueless about it?

Is this thread some meta, ironic thing? There are many, many theories of how to interpret texts, but afaik they all generally agree that you have to actually read the text. OP's trying to make a theoretically conservative argument while in practice taking the radical stance that actually the Wikipedia article is fine.

Death of the Author was brought ip in a thread about creativity.

I find it paradoxical,
That it seems very hard to be an empathic person. Yet Barthes says that trying to get into the mind and walk in the authors shoes is 'lazy' when its pretty much a given that when ever we come across new information we try to jam it into already preexisting schemas that we have.
I kbow Barthes thinks a work is trapped by this, but most works of art start you out in a cave and eventually bring you to the light.
When interpreting a work , you need to establish your expertise on the matter so you give it historical context, this cannot be done without some concept of an author. Then to get your PhD you talk about how Ulysses fits into a transhumanist paradigm.

kek

I am interpreting it but i am using histotical clues to give it context text.
If death of the author really didnt matter than why do we have so many different translations of works? More over why are other translations regarded more than others?

If Death of the Author mattered then we would all be reading Hesoid in its original greek and we'd be contantly asking ourselves what some dead greek symbols arranged in patterns really means.

>I am interpreting it but i am using histotical clues to give it context text.
So something other than the author's statements or reconstructions of the author's thoughts? Because "Historical clues"encompass a much wider scope than an individual author.

>If death of the author really didnt matter than why do we have so many different translations of works? More over why are other translations regarded more than others?
I can't even understand what point you're trying to make with this.

>If Death of the Author mattered then we would all be reading Hesoid in its original greek and we'd be contantly asking ourselves what some dead greek symbols arranged in patterns really means.
No, it means we look at things other than what Hesiod said (nothing), or what we can reasonably construe Hesiod would have said (also nothing) in interpreting the text. Nothing more, nothing less.

So maybe if he didnt say anything in regards to interpretation, maybe we arent supposed to interpret it?

I am using clues with in the text, to establish a dialect,region, and contextual meaning of other words, then i am looking to other witing similar to area and time period to find similarieties. Which is important to the author if you want to place the author in any sort of accurate context.

What translation of Hesoid are you using? Or is there only one definitive translation?
Why should we even trust the translators interpretation?
What made you choose that translation over others?
>All those people implying the wiki article interprets it wrong

>Veeky Forums doesn't know what death of the author is

what a surprise, this board is filled with pseuds

I keep seeing this posted but it never comes with any rationale, or explanation.

Why is that?

Not going to spoonfeed you

This thread is proof that Veeky Forums is dead

Like I said, many people will concede that making art takes more creativity than interpreting it. The idea behind (most modern incarnations of) Death of the Author is only that we can interpret things in ways that seem counter to their author's intentions, and that those interpretations are no less legitimate than those condoned by the author.

The broader philosophical argument about authors vs author functions vs creativity-isn't-even-a-thing-anyway-why-bother is more about aesthetics than literary theory, although it is a novel way to argue for Death of the Author, which is why the idea's early proponents seized on it.

>tl;dr — DotA is only about interpretation, not what takes "more creativity."

Of course the presence of the author shouldn't be ignored. The problem is that when you pick up a 10th reprint mass market paperback of a book first published in 1848, the author is absent in every conceivable sense but the borderline spiritual one you seem to be pitching upon.

Author based interpretation is like ad hominem arguing. It doesn't matter if a text was written by James Joyce or Adolph Hitler if everything else about it is kept the same. Reading it differently based on who wrote it means you're failing to give an honest interpretation of the text itself.