What does Veeky Forums think of the concept of Death Of An Author?

...

It's quite an interesting concept. Reading the French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles really puts it into practice.

It sounds retarded. The author obviously wrote it for a reason, and that reason matters.

It sounds like an excuse to shove in modern values into ancient works

>It sounds like an excuse to shove in modern values into ancient works
No, the idea is that very often (or almost always) people's understanding of ancient or any works will be inflected by their values and their knowledge-base derived from their own times. I.e. People are shoving in modern values into ancient works because that's just how the process of reading works. This is obvious shit.

It can sometimes have merit when analyzing a work but it's so prone to abuse that it's better to just not use it unless you have a great deal of self-control and you should ignore out of hand pretty much anyone who uses it.

>it's so prone to abuse that it's better to just not use it unless
Barthes's essay is not a model to be applied to data. It's more like an op-ed explaining to the lay public how the hermeneutic process works. There is nothing to apply or not apply.

>>Death of the author

It depends on the art really, an author can intentionally make art that is meaningless that needs to be interpreted by another/the artist after creation to actually have "meaning". As an artist I consider my art unsuccessful if I fail to communicate what I'm trying to get across though if I'm trying to get anything across at all that is. Unsuccessful art is "bad" art and successful art is not "good" art though, if it illicits an emotional response that isn't "this art is shit" its probably good art on some level.

>>Unsuccessful art is "bad" art
*isn't

>That feel when you've seen debates between authors and critics where the critic goes hardline no that is not what the book is about...

EXACTLY

Death of the author doesn't say you should ignore all context, it's just describing what actually happens, i.e. that every reading will be influenced by knowledge from ones own time and experiences and it's impossible to know literally every facet of a work's creation for interpretation.

People saying "you shouldn't use it" and other asinine comments have no idea what it means, they've invented some conspiracy about evil marxist revisionists.

Don't be retarded. Any communication has to be reassembled and interpreted at the point of reception. There is no lossless transmission of data in any of the media we recognize as art.

That point would hold merit if the correct definition was the one that most people used. Unfortunately this is not the case.

Well would you look at this stupid post. You are literally doing what Barthes described in his essay, namely interpreting his work in the way that suits your agenda the best. And to top it off you are saying that it's the reception that matters more than the actual text, even where the reception is clearly against the plain language of the text. I guess Barthes was right.

Fucking wreckt.

I'm not saying that, I'm saying that "death of the author" more-or-less means some unholy marriage of "revisionism" and "reading between the lines" in common parlance. I agree with what you said, but most people have no idea of what death of the author actually is.

>the idea is good
>but stupid people interpret it wrongly so it's bad
I guess all of academia is bad because lay people misunderstand it?

I didn't say it's bad, just that the term is abused.

Fair enough.

Ezra and his cantos probably hold some value in all of this, when he was older he said they were largely meaningless. He was imprisoned for a while but he seemed sane enough.

The eternal hetero strikes again

Death of the author precludes criticizing the author, does it not?

angelfire.com/weird/ektomage/otherwriting/bard.html
Reminds me of Asimov's The Immortal Bard, based on an actual encounter with a critic.

Perfectly reasonable. In the end there is only text and it is all that counts. If you don't need to dig in Euclid biography to understand geometry from his work then you don't need to dig into Shakespeare entire life to understand what he tried to express.

>There is no lossless transmission of data in any of the media we recognize as art.
The fact that lossless transmission doesn't exist is no excuse for tossing out all the data that is transmitted. The concept is generally used to justify doing just that.

> lossless transmission doesn't exist
It is proven to exist.

In this specific context, or in general?

wow dude source

>literally taking the quote out of context
Another great example of interpretation being completely different from the original text.

A stupid concept that has no value.
You always have to take into account the time and circumstances and influences of the work- I would say the death of the author only applies to critical works, like film critics or something because their texts are obviously influenced by their own opinion but they need to get a point across to everyone, a book does not have to make sense

Its the act of trying that counts in this situation, even if the intended meaning isn't 100% clear you can at least narrow down possible interpretations via design. I'm usually not trying to communicate something extremely specific anyway, art isn't fucking morse code.

your posts are in vain, the people you're arguing with are obviously mentally challenged, see:

people that are literally too stupid to grasp a concept even the simplest mind would understand after reading the first few lines of the wikipedia entry.

(which they haven't, of course)

not an arguement

The idea that a certain concept should be dismissed not based on it's merits but because like literally every concept every made it will be used by people you dislike to say stupid things is not compelling argument.

Are you saying muh headcanon because it endorses the creation of headcanon, or because by the author having the final say, you lose the ability to create your headcanon and are making fun of the people who do?

This is why it is important for you humans to articulate what you mean even when you are trying to trivialize something.

It lets you do very interesting things with a work that not even the author would be capable of doing. But otherwise it all sort of feels empty, because that's not the real reason it was made, you're creating an illusion.

I think the best way to handle Death of the Author critique is in creating your own piece of work (ie literature, film etc.) and giving the work your underlying interpretive critique. Outright responding to something with the DotA in mind won't feel very imperative.

An elaborate justification for what is essentially academically acceptable fan fiction.

It doesn't matter what he intended, only the text itself matters. Just make up your own interpretation, and if anyone calls you disingenuous call them uneducated.

Upboated.

>>Just make up your own interpretation, and if anyone calls you disingenuous call them uneducated.

And this is why so much modern literary criticism is laughable and idiotic.

Authorial intent matters goddammit, and yes so does the time in which the book was written and so to does the interpretation of that the work in question by modern audiences, but the intent of the author is what ultimately matters the most.