"You only wrote this, I actually read it"

[Cowabungaa]

The author carefully chooses every word, and every idea in their work. It's a laborious process. The idea that there are themes the author is unaware of is, I think, untrue. Instead what we have is an audience reading too much into things, or misinterpreting information. Which is fine. But when they try to assert their interpretation over the authors, then they are truly arrogant. I see no arrogance in an artist claiming to understand something they themselves created.

I largely agree that most things are relative, but if you take that concept too far then it becomes impossible for any work of art to really mean anything. Art becomes nothing more then a mirror that reflects your own ideas.

The thing is that this has the hidden premise that people write wholly consciously. They don't, because people aren't wholly conscious beings. A lot happens unconsciously and writing is no exception to that. Paradigms and viewpoints that slip in that the author is often not aware of. It's also why it's so hard to judge the era we live in, or why in science it's pretty much impossible to really see the paradigm they're currently in; they're too close to the facts, as it were.

On top of that, maybe you chose every word and idea carefully in your writing, but this is not the same for every writer. Writing, after all, is an art and not a science. There's more than one way to skin that cat. Neither does careful writing guarantee that nothing unconscious slips through, as it were.

Now of course, as I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I do agree that the extreme idea that the author is dead is foolish, considering what it'd mean for the notions of knowledge and truth. But to say that the author is wholly in control is foolish too when we consider human nature.

 

[Zen Bard]

I know they used this joke in...Back to School? That Rodney Dangerfield movie where he went back to school, and had Kurt Vonnegut help him with his book review of one of Kurt's books.

I believe it was Kurt Vonnegut (though I haven't had a chance to validate this, yet) His nephew asked him for help on a paper about "Slaughterhouse Five". Vonnegut, thinking it would be a slam dunk, wrote the entire paper for him.

A couple of days later, his nephew returned and angrily slammed the graded term paper down in front of his uncle.

The teacher gave him an "F" and had written "You clearly don't understand Kurt Vonnegut."

I was thinking of a different author but the story might have been ripped off the Kurt Vonnegut one. Or, dunno, maybe there was a story further in the past that both ripped off.

At any rate, thanks for the input - I hadn't heard of this tale with Kurt Vonnegut

You're probably right. Most likely, it's an urban legend type-story that, in actuality, happened to NO ONE but is attributed to everyone.

What sticks in my mind in the version I heard is that after Vonnegut read the teacher's comments, he looked up at his nephew and said "Holy shit! He's right!"...which just seems like a very Kurt Vonnegut thing to do.

 

[kekkres]

I know they used this joke in...Back to School? That Rodney Dangerfield movie where he went back to school, and had Kurt Vonnegut help him with his book review of one of Kurt's books.

I believe it was Kurt Vonnegut (though I haven't had a chance to validate this, yet) His nephew asked him for help on a paper about "Slaughterhouse Five". Vonnegut, thinking it would be a slam dunk, wrote the entire paper for him.

A couple of days later, his nephew returned and angrily slammed the graded term paper down in front of his uncle.

The teacher gave him an "F" and had written "You clearly don't understand Kurt Vonnegut."

I was thinking of a different author but the story might have been ripped off the Kurt Vonnegut one. Or, dunno, maybe there was a story further in the past that both ripped off.

At any rate, thanks for the input - I hadn't heard of this tale with Kurt Vonnegut

I know for a fact that a Literature professor told tolkien that LOTR was clearly an allegory for WW2 and he was incorrect in his denial of that.

 

[dyre]

The author is dead doesn't mean you can say whatever you want about someone's work.
It means you can interpret it however you want want as long as you can back it up
The author's word is a good place to go for some insight, but if you see something there that really speaks to you, then it's there, even if the author didn't explicitly mean it that way

As an addendum to your point about needing to back up your interpretations, I think the main reason that reader interpretation has gotten such a bad rep lately is because of prevalence of half-baked, poorly backed "theories" out there, thanks to the "everyone gets to have an opinion" phenomena of the internet.

Stupid internet opinions aside, literary criticism has been a perfectly legitimate field of study. The author doesn't usually spell out what he means (maybe at the thematic level, but certainly not line-by-line). It usually falls on careful readers to dissect his work, using not only the text but also an awareness of historical context, the author's beliefs, etc.

 

[LordLundar]

Ahh the "death of author" fallacy.

Yup, I said fallacy because it's bunk. Pure, unadulterated garbage and people using it as an explanation are deluding themselves.

See, here's the thing, literary works fall in the realm of art for a very good reason. They are subjective and open to interpretation. Despite that your interpretation of a work is different from an author's does not erase their intent and interpretation. Neither you nor the author are wrong. It might be flawed which opens itself to further analysis but which is "right" and "wrong" is trying to apply an objective response to a subjective work. Worse yet when such attempts are done without any real work put into such theories (Read: the author's wrong because I say so")

Death of the Author is a really bad attempt to justify such ludicrous efforts. Worse yet, Academia is trying to teach it as a means to force only one way of thinking.

 

[BytByte]

Ahh the "death of author" fallacy.

Yup, I said fallacy because it's bunk. Pure, unadulterated garbage and people using it as an explanation are deluding themselves.

See, here's the thing, literary works fall in the realm of art for a very good reason. They are subjective and open to interpretation. Despite that your interpretation of a work is different from an author's does not erase their intent and interpretation. Neither you nor the author are wrong. It might be flawed which opens itself to further analysis but which is "right" and "wrong" is trying to apply an objective response to a subjective work. Worse yet when such attempts are done without any real work put into such theories (Read: the author's wrong because I say so")

Death of the Author is a really bad attempt to justify such ludicrous efforts. Worse yet, Academia is trying to teach it as a means to force only one way of thinking.

Is that what dead author means? That only the public decides? I always thought it was the combination, the push and pull of interpretations that revolve around a work.

 

[Drathnoxis]

The author carefully chooses every word, and every idea in their work. It's a laborious process. The idea that there are themes the author is unaware of is, I think, untrue. Instead what we have is an audience reading too much into things, or misinterpreting information. Which is fine. But when they try to assert their interpretation over the authors, then they are truly arrogant. I see no arrogance in an artist claiming to understand something they themselves created.

I largely agree that most things are relative, but if you take that concept too far then it becomes impossible for any work of art to really mean anything. Art becomes nothing more then a mirror that reflects your own ideas.

Oh come on, you've never written something, then read it later and realized it doesn't actually imply what you thought you were implying at the time?

And what about people that write by the seat of their pants, like Akira Toriyama? You don't think that he never wrote a meaning to a character or event without fully being aware of it?

Spoiler: I think this video provides a pretty convincing argument that he did.

I think the end of this video provides a pretty convincing argument that he did.

Or what about a work that an author wrote twenty, thirty, forty+ years ago and hasn't looked at since? You don't think their interpretation could be muddled by experiences they've had since they finished writing it, or by things they've forgotten? Again, I remember people talking about an interview Toriyama had where he had forgotten that the Piccolo in the later arcs was not the same Piccolo that had initially conquered the world. Stuff like that would completely change the interpretation of the character.

I think it's very improbable that a writer will remember their exact intentions for every part of a story decades later, and many authors come to dislike their earlier work. So why should their imperfect interpretation be any more valid than somebody who has been rereading and analyzing the work for a decade?

Saying that an author knows the definitive meaning of their work, now and forever, is just too much for me to buy.

 

[DoPo]

What sticks in my mind in the version I heard is that after Vonnegut read the teacher's comments, he looked up at his nephew and said "Holy shit! He's right!"...which just seems like a very Kurt Vonnegut thing to do.

Oh, this is good. Indeed very Vonnegut-like

 

[chikusho]

Ahh the "death of author" fallacy.

Yup, I said fallacy because it's bunk. Pure, unadulterated garbage and people using it as an explanation are deluding themselves.

See, here's the thing, literary works fall in the realm of art for a very good reason. They are subjective and open to interpretation. Despite that your interpretation of a work is different from an author's does not erase their intent and interpretation. Neither you nor the author are wrong. It might be flawed which opens itself to further analysis but which is "right" and "wrong" is trying to apply an objective response to a subjective work.

First, you say that the "death of the author" is "pure unadulterated garbage"... And then you describe how it really is by using the definition of the death of the author ... What?

 

[Thurston]

My favourite example is Jack Chick tracts. Mr. Chick's intent is to warn of us of the imminent dangers to our immortal soul. What I get from it is that Jack Chick is a horribly misinformed paranoid delusional conspiracy-theory racist.

 

[FalloutJack]

Of course, no reader has the actual right to do that, but unfortunately this has been happening since...well...religious texts all over the world became a thing.

 

[LordLundar]

Ahh the "death of author" fallacy.

Yup, I said fallacy because it's bunk. Pure, unadulterated garbage and people using it as an explanation are deluding themselves.

See, here's the thing, literary works fall in the realm of art for a very good reason. They are subjective and open to interpretation. Despite that your interpretation of a work is different from an author's does not erase their intent and interpretation. Neither you nor the author are wrong. It might be flawed which opens itself to further analysis but which is "right" and "wrong" is trying to apply an objective response to a subjective work.

First, you say that the "death of the author" is "pure unadulterated garbage"... And then you describe how it really is by using the definition of the death of the author ... What?

Read it again. I said that having a different interpretation does not erase the original intent or interpretation. "Death of the Author" tries to do exactly that by trying to assign only one interpretation that cannot be challenged. Or did I really need to spell it out that directly?

 

[briankoontz]

This doesn't just apply to art - this is a function of all communication. So when you say something in a conversation it means something to you, but the listener might interpret it in some other way entirely.

Or, alternatively, we could say that all communication is art.

 

[chikusho]

Read it again. I said that having a different interpretation does not erase the original intent or interpretation. "Death of the Author" tries to do exactly that by trying to assign only one interpretation that cannot be challenged. Or did I really need to spell it out that directly?

In that case, I don't think you know what the death of the author theory means. What it means is that the authors intentions do not matter; only the work itself can be judged. That doesn't invalidate the authors own interpretation. You just can't or shouldn't take it into account when reading and interpreting it yourself.

And there are plenty of good reasons for this, with the most apparent and obvious being: it's literally impossible to know what the authors intentions were. Even in cases where the author explicitly tells you, there's no way to know whether or not their statements or explanations are true.

 

[maninahat]

I like death of the author theory, even if the authors themselves might find it exasperating. To an extent, all literacy criticism becomes redundant if we slavishly have to agree with the author's interpretation of their own work, and I'd rather not have some writer deciding for me the implications of a goddamn story.

 

[Fox12]

Read it again. I said that having a different interpretation does not erase the original intent or interpretation. "Death of the Author" tries to do exactly that by trying to assign only one interpretation that cannot be challenged. Or did I really need to spell it out that directly?

In that case, I don't think you know what the death of the author theory means. What it means is that the authors intentions do not matter; only the work itself can be judged. That doesn't invalidate the authors own interpretation. You just can't or shouldn't take it into account when reading and interpreting it yourself.

And there are plenty of good reasons for this, with the most apparent and obvious being: it's literally impossible to know what the authors intentions were. Even in cases where the author explicitly tells you, there's no way to know whether or not their statements or explanations are true.

But this where the whole argument comes apart at the seams. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can read Dante's Inferno, and appreciate it by itself. But it's literally impossible to fully appreciate it unless you research the actual author, and the politics of the Catholic Church and Italy. You can't research the text itself, and discount important outside influences. The authors intentions are paramount in this case, because the author himself is both the narrator and the protagonist. They are inseparable. It throws out important aspects of literary criticism for the sake of subjectivity. But this type of subjectivity could never produce the kind of literary scholarships that other methods have.

 

[DoPo]

Ahh the "death of author" fallacy.

Yup, I said fallacy because it's bunk. Pure, unadulterated garbage and people using it as an explanation are deluding themselves.

See, here's the thing, literary works fall in the realm of art for a very good reason. They are subjective and open to interpretation. Despite that your interpretation of a work is different from an author's does not erase their intent and interpretation. Neither you nor the author are wrong. It might be flawed which opens itself to further analysis but which is "right" and "wrong" is trying to apply an objective response to a subjective work.

First, you say that the "death of the author" is "pure unadulterated garbage"... And then you describe how it really is by using the definition of the death of the author ... What?

Read it again. I said that having a different interpretation does not erase the original intent or interpretation. "Death of the Author" tries to do exactly that by trying to assign only one interpretation that cannot be challenged. Or did I really need to spell it out that directly?

How did what you said not relate to exactly what Death of the Author is? And how is Death of the Author trying to assign only one interpretation? This is exactly the opposite of what the essay suggests - it claims, and I quote,

To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.

it explicitly argues against having a single interpretation of the work and against that single interpretation being the actual author themselves.

 

[chikusho]

But this where the whole argument comes apart at the seams. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can read Dante's Inferno, and appreciate it by itself. But it's literally impossible to fully appreciate it unless you research the actual author, and the politics of the Catholic Church and Italy. You can't research the text itself, and discount important outside influences. The authors intentions are paramount in this case, because the author himself is both the narrator and the protagonist. They are inseparable. It throws out important aspects of literary criticism for the sake of subjectivity. But this type of subjectivity could never produce the kind of literary scholarships that other methods have.

No, art doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's literally being created as it's being consumed. You can research the author, you can research the history and the times and the politics all you want; it will still be a subjective experience based solely and exclusively within the consumer. The only way an authors true intentions can ever be known is if we can somehow record and play back the neurons firing when the work is created - anything and everything outside of that is nothing more than conjecture.