What do you guys think about the concept that authorial intent doesn't matter at all in literary analysis?

What do you guys think about the concept that authorial intent doesn't matter at all in literary analysis?

Personally, I think it's bullshit and it's often used for dumb interpretations.

Its just a way for people to legitimize their headcanon.

>according to literary critics, literary critics should have higher status than authors.

Lol ok

This. I've seen it often used by Tumblr-tier "this character is totally gay!" folks.

the author himself is simply another literary critic w/r/t his work

Authorial intent is the only thing that matters.

People can write their epistles arguing that their fanfiction is the true intent, but they're fundamentally wrong. They're boorish people who obscure the true point of the text.

It's retarded to say that authorial intent doesn't matter at all, obviously the author had some sort of intent that informs their work, but it's not the be all and end all of analysis.
It's less important if you're just reading something and you interact with the book in a different fashion than the author intended.

The main thrust of Barthes' "Death of the Author" is against limiting the text to a single interpretation that precludes all others. If you stamp one interpretation as "the official one" then further discussion becomes meaningless. In other words, authorial intent is the bane of literary criticism and puts them out of a job.

Authorial intent is not god, particularly when an author is writing the Other. For example, if an author is writing the inhabitants of a colonized land as vaguely mystical, subservient, happy-go-lucky children, I consider it irresponsible to think, "Well, maybe it simply is the case that these particular characters really do have those characteristics and the author has portrayed them accurately."

Death of the author is one of the firmest affirmations of literature as being art. It's not a license to say whatever the fuck you want about a piece or to interpret it wildly outside of its bounds. Art exists outside of the artist and lives on past the artist. It can be reread as the world and readers change. Good literature affords the opportunity to develop a diverse set of perspectives about its features and message and aesthetics. Bad criticism is still bad criticism--it's illogical, or it's poorly grounded in the text, or the interpretive framework is itself faulty, or has some other defect that makes it wild conjecture by an idiot.

That being said, there's a big difference between art that is open to continuing evaluation and reevaluation. Kafka wrote enigmatic, dense and symbolic pieces that continue to echo with new resonance. J.K. Rowling wrote hack prose for kids learning to read who think wizards are cool. Some works are polemic or have a direct vision. There's not another reading of Atlas Shrugged other than the one Rand intended. It's an argument for a particular political and economic system. Animal Farm is an allegory about Stalinism. There's not another way to interpret it that relates to the text. But some texts are written with relation to their present time and place.

But some texts are written with relation to their time and place and need to be continually resituated and related to the reader as they are reread by new and different readers, alien to that original context.

Sorry I fucked up that last sentence in the original post.

The intent of the author should be present if the work succeeds in conveying the message the author intended it to have.

if the author succeeds, good criticism will successfully interpret this message.

However, if an author needs come out afterwards and say "No, no, all you dumb fucks got it wrong". Then they've failed in this matter, though the work can still be interpreted in other ways that are profound.

>particularly when an author is writing the Other

Stopped reading right there.

I think authorial intent is good and all, but only beta faggots memorize biographies and won't dare to make a statement on anything without autistically verifying it first.

Same with all those faggot autists being all >post le source on Veeky Forums

Whoever made that comic is an idiot and a bad reader. Death of the author does not mean full license to ascribe whatever phantasmagoric reimagining the critic likes onto the text, as (equally fantastically) imagined by this numbskull . Rather, death of the author simply means that invoking the figure of the author, which, given the material facts of the production the literary work (it is produced over a long period of time during which the author writing it necessarily transforms not only his vision of the work, but his imaginary representations of the world he lives in and ostensibly tries to represent), is fundamentally a construct, a convenient device of the lazy critic who, as above, tries to conjure up some authoritative and all-meaning, transcendentally and teleologically signifying author-figure, weaved together out of the scantest of biographical details, in order to impress upon the work of fiction ideas matching his own (that is, the critic's) ideological investments.

I agree with you 100%. But what is the "Other" some people use?

It matters, but it shouldn't be the "final word".

White people writing blacks for example

gay autist detected

I don't even disagree wiht you, but you still write like a homosexual aspergerian

Das good mayne

pussy

It's about a member of one demographic (e.g., white people, straight people) writing about another demographic (non-whites, LGBT people). It's not that it can't be done, but it's an issue if there's a history of that minority being oppressed or disenfranchised by that majority demographic - and doubly so if the writer attempts to write about that oppression (e.g., a white writer trying to write a story about a black man facing racism in 1950s America). A general rule of thumb - not a "hard rule", so much as a "helpful suggestion" - is to avoid writing about that kind of oppression if you haven't faced it. In other words, don't write a story about a gay kid facing anti-LGBT animus if you never had to experience that sort of thing yourself.

It makes sense in theory as a way of fostering discussion but gets egg on its face when you realize that most readers and critics are total retards or insufferable hacks forcing their own agenda on everything.

What about a black man writing an award-winning short story about white men being killed in Sputh Africa?

Also, the concept seems dumb as fuck - if they can't accurately depict depression and struggle then they likely aren't very good writers.

Like I said, it's more a suggestion than a hard rule. A writer trying to tackle oppression they've only ever read about can end up being (ugh) "problematic". It takes a shitload of care to pull it off without seeming as if the writer is trying to exploit the oppressed.

What if the writer is trying to exploit the oppressed?

Then they're an asshole.

>people who think the issue is that we have full access to the author's intended meaning and simply choose to throw it out in favor of multiple interpretations
Forget reading Barthes and Foucault. Some of you need to start with some Wittgenstein.

But that's an opinion :^)

The issue is we have faggots using this defense without really understanding what it really means.

Then you call them a faggot for making ungrounded claims. It doesn't mean the base theory is bullshit. You're just doing the same thing they're doing -- they wildly misinterpret some novel and act like their fantasy is somehow ascribable to the text, then you take their misinterpretation of Barthes, Foucault, etc. as though it were suddenly grounded in those core texts and call it bullshit on that account.

>Then you call them a faggot for making ungrounded claims

Already did senpai.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Muh oppression is largely retarded hogwash. Oppression exists but the people bitching about it the loudest have never actually experienced it and are either ironically using members of their own "opressed" group as a means of profiting off the cottage industry of ineffectual activism, or are identifying as part of an "oppressed" group or class when they've functionally experienced little to no actual oppression themselves.

Yeah, pretty much.

I just met some historical lesbian novel authoress who thinks she really knows how oppressed women and the poor in the past.

>ALL WORK STANDS ALONE. PERIOD. FULL-STOP.

>EXCEPT MY PO-MO MASTERPIECE, WHICH YOU JUST. DON'T. GET. HOLD ON LET ME EXPLAIN, IN CRINGING DETAIL YOU NEVER ASKED FOR, WHAT. EXACTLY. I MEANT.