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let's talk about authorship y'all

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pwhodges:
To my mind that's a cop-out. 

Why this insistence on getting rid of authorial intention?  The author(artist/composer) wrote words (made sketches / musical notes), and there is simply no getting away from that.  Sometimes they find that what they produce doesn't sufficiently represent their intentions, and they revise it; sometimes they are unclear what their intentions are, and they revise; sometimes their intentions change, and they revise.  Then others come along and try to make sense of it in all the ways that editors do, and it gets a mess.  But to say that the author's intention has no part to play in the meaning of the result is just a simplification to make the critic's life easier.  Of course  it has a part, and  the editor's, and  everyone else's. 

Throwing out the author to reduce the complication is, as I said first, just a cop-out.

I spent this evening in the theatre, watching, no, experiencing  RC Sherriff's Journey's End.  This play is written from his experience in the trenches during the First World War, like the writings of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.  These men wrote specifically to make us aware of what that horror does to us, and our minds.  It is not simple reportage, but something more than that, so how can you conceivably say that their intention is not necessary to our understanding of their message?

David_Dovey:
I think the key is that authorial intention as not intrinsically expressed in the work itself is the thing that doesn't count i.e; additional information gleaned from interviews author and etc. Or, alternately, that if we were to find evidence that Sherriff actually thought his experiences in the trenches were a jolly good time and he had no qualms with war at all, would that necessarily change the underlying point of Journey's End, as expressed by the content of the text?

This is perhaps a weak example (based mostly on conjecture as it is), but I feel it's still relevant: This article by the editor behind the decision to remove a certain racial slur from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which states that Mark Twain would've supported the move. Say Twain was still alive to personally mandate the removal of the slur, does that make it any more legitimate, because he is the author? By lessening the emotional heft of the language in the book, and the poignancy that has w/r/t the novel's commentary on race and hatred, you could reasonably argue that the inclusion of a slur-free Huck Finn into the canon of American literature would be less likely.

Another infinitely more crass example: The 1997 Special Editions of the Star Wars films. It has become close to orthodoxy that these versions of the films are vastly inferior to the originals, but the reason they were re-cut and polished was to bring them closer in line with the creator's intentions, but in doing so, he lessened the enjoyment of the films for a great many people.

Papersatan:
And, presumably you can experience that work, and get that message without knowing anything about the real life of the author who wrote it, no?  If a writer is good at their craft their work makes the argument for them, and stands independent of them.  I am not saying that the experiences of a person will not influence what they write, I just think it is futile to try and make it go the other way.  To, as a reader, try to understand what this text says based on what the author did in their lives, or to try to find out what the author was really like, or thought based on their works.  

I think it is constricting to the real, full and complex person who once lived (or still does).  You can't understand a person, not fully, and to try and understand their work based on 2 pages of biography, that seems worthless to me.  For example, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, must I keep in mind her place as a woman, a mother, a mother of a still born?  those facts may change the reading I come away with but I don't think you can reasonably argue that X appeared in the text BECAUSE she lost a child.  Or that because X appeared in the text she felt Y about losing a child.  Mary Shelly the living breathing person was infinitely more complex than a few facts about her life.  Using authors to define their text is flawed because in doing so you distill their lives into a series of events which support common readings.  The facts we know about Mary Shelly are based on the works she wrote.  How can it be both ways?   How can I use what I know about an author to understand a text when what I know about the author is only what is relevant to understanding the text?  

I see the benefit in using an author as a sort of connection between works, (was this Foucault I am channeling now? it has been so long) but as far as I am concerned that "author" is a work of fiction.  A set of parentheses, like a meta narrator maybe.  But not someone that is really connected to the living person that may have shared their name.  

KharBevNor:
I'm not trying to say that the author should be completely disregarded as a matter of course. If we, the reader, know certain things about the author or their stated intention it may (it cannot but help, really) colour our viewing of the work. What I'm trying to say is that authorial intent as a form of metatext is not necessary (or necessarily reliable) in the process of relating to a work. Knowledge of the author as a seperate entity is simply an ancillary fact. The author as presented through the text however is (like the text itself) a result of artifice, a carefully (or not so carefully) crafted fiction, even if mostly based on fact (not always the case of course). The problem with enshrining a form of authorial authority (goddammit) is that it takes away from the fact that meaning is a social construct and arises through a social dialogue that the author may not necessarily be a component in. This is not to say that the author can't try and guide the interpretation of their work, they have every right to. On the other hand, in the field I work in (fine art) that can often be seen as being rather heavy-handed, to say the least. Surely the dream of every creative individual is to create a work so powerful/interesting/funny/groundbreaking/whatever that it wouldn't matter who made it for it to be considered a masterpiece?

Inlander:
The important thing is that there is an author. Who the author is is largely besides the point. So for instance in the famous case of Raymond Carver, whose writing was paired back and in many cases almost utterly changed by his editor, who was the author? Ultimately it doesn't matter; what matters is that the stories exist, and have been created in that form, and presented to the public. (Of course in Carver's case the original stories have subsequently published, and differ sufficiently from the canon versions that they're essentially different texts altogether.) Putting a name to a work is just some cult-of-personality stuff that gets in the way, really. The important point is that the work was created by somebody, i.e. as an expression of genuine living human consciousness, who had a definite intention to convey something through the medium of writing. The message is what's important, not the messenger.

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