tell me if I'm wrong Veeky Forums.
Death of the author is the concept that the intent of an author is irrelevant, or at least less important than what the people experiencing his work perceive about it, specially if it goes against something the author believes.
Sort of, it's not just about intent of the author though, its the idea that any knowledge about the author is irrelevant, including biographical information, personal beliefs, or even the historical context, and letting the work stand entirely by itself. I think it's useful in some cases, like reading Ender's Game, but ultimately leads to a flawed understanding of the material. It's not exactly Veeky Forums, but I think Chris-chan serves as an extreme example of why it just doesn't work.
No, it's one should not be limited by speculating about "intent" since that's muddy territory. To be clear, a critical interpretation that does not have any basis in the text is not a cogent one. So it's not about "making up your own meaning," since it's all from the text itself.
authorial intent literally never mattered.
it means what the author thought he was writing about has no relevance to how people read it, like did melville really intend moby dick to be all homoerotic n shit? who knows? who cares? the text is what matter, the search for "author's intent" just comes from biblical hermeneutics where people try to figure out "what did god mean by this" type stuff, but no one knows what the fuck god meant and according to nietzsche he's dead anyways but we all keep trying to find meaning in the shiz
This, it's just a bogeyman that the postmodernists invented to beat up on so that they could feel edgy. See also: "There's no thing as Truth with a capital T!!"
The author is an unreliable narrator.
>no one knows what the fuck god meant and according to nietzsche he's dead anyways
deal with it nerd
I think the real point is that readers want to feel more special than the author when the author did all the damn work and the reader is just someone who reacts to it.
When you're a reader, you're basically the authors bitch. That's why people get so upset when a story doesn't go the way they want, they at some point believed in the author's story and the author fucked them and left with all their money and made them pregnant.
"Death of the author" is the reader, literature professors, and the modern worthless suburbanites trying to feel like they are the man in the relationship, they are in control, the novel is what it means to 'them' and they can freely redefine everything.
No you can't. The text has an effect on you. It was intended to be this way. The author is always there, making you his bitch, and the only way the pounding stops is if you put down the book. That's the real death of the author.
Death of the Author was originally to combat autists who go to far and look at shit like, "When he uses the words, 'and then he,' on page 243, paragraph 3, sentence 4, I think his choice of words indicates that he was molested by his teacher in the fall semester of the 3rd grade but it could also mean that he's trying to tell us exactly how he felt on the night of January 23, 1917 when he reportedly was drinking in a bar off state street in Chicago owned by a man who was a notorious tomato thief and would leave a mint with ever aperitif."
Then the postmodernists took it way too far as the pendulum swung back the other way and use it to claim that Death of the Author means the author never means anything in his work at all and, in fact, if the author tries to convey anything through his work he should be lined up and shot.
As with all things, the truth is in the middle.
This kills the Barthes
Your second paragraph is wrong. If you wanna provide quotes in your defense pls do
I'm confused what you're asking me to provide. Unfortunately it's a question that we'll never answer, similar to asking what God's intentions are/were in creation. (please note: not starting a theological argument, just a hypothetical)
The question becomes if the author never intended to convey ANYTHING to the reader, then what was the purpose of creating anything at all?
In essence, if the author's intent is to be completely discarded and tossed aside, then there is no point in the author to create anything at all. Personally, I don't buy the theory that the author just creates to create.
You're describing New Criticism
Derrida requires authorial intent for deconstruction to even work
an important part of his argument is that the writer or artist isn't so much a God-Creator but rather someone who synthesizes and combines pre-existing cultural materials; therefore ideologies and histories and ideas that the author doesn't necessarily espouse himself works their way into his work (connected to post/structuralism insofar as an artist or writer has no way "outside" of culture)
The way Rosalind Krauss (who is accredited with introducing French post-structuralist theory into art history) used it was trying to counter the use of biographical information as a sort of aesthetic explanation. In the 70s there came the rise of social theories of art which still takes intent into account, but it's not the final say in the interpretation of the work (and neither was style).
I know. I could have been more clear that not ALL postmodernists take it too far. I don't hate all postmodernism. I hate many works in many styles. I hate some Romantics. Realists. Naturalists. Surrealists. Beats. Post-Colonials. Formalists. Magical Realists. Confessionals. Transcendentalists. Gothics. Metaphysists. I hate all kinds.
Yeah you're wrong, pretty much.
Read the essay a few more times, slowly
john green wrote this