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let's talk about authorship y'all
KharBevNor:
There's a philosophical queston here. What about a work created by a computer or a technique like cut-up. Less airily, what about work created by a committee, or a work that evolved through aural transmission or other sorts of retelling? How do you site authorship in these cases? I s a work written and rewritten and revised by thirty people really "an expression of genuine living human consciousness"?
pwhodges:
While thinking about this, consider the example of the King James Bible (aka "Authorised Version") of 1611.
Inlander:
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 27 Feb 2011, 01:34 ---How do you site authorship in these cases? I s a work written and rewritten and revised by thirty people really "an expression of genuine living human consciousness"?
--- End quote ---
What on earth else could it be? It wasn't written by thirty trees!
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 27 Feb 2011, 01:49 ---While thinking about this, consider the example of the King James Bible (aka "Authorised Version") of 1611.
--- End quote ---
An excellent example of being able to identify clear purpose and intent in a work of plural authorship.
(Sorry for the brief and glib replies, my laptop battery keeps telling me it's abou to run out.)
KharBevNor:
--- Quote from: Inlander on 27 Feb 2011, 05:46 ---
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 27 Feb 2011, 01:34 ---How do you site authorship in these cases? I s a work written and rewritten and revised by thirty people really "an expression of genuine living human consciousness"?
--- End quote ---
What on earth else could it be? It wasn't written by thirty trees!
--- End quote ---
It's an expression of thirty people, and thus arguably, an expression of no individual consciousness. Or are we retreating our definitions of authorship here?
Papersatan:
--- Quote from: Inlander on 27 Feb 2011, 05:46 ---
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 27 Feb 2011, 01:49 ---While thinking about this, consider the example of the King James Bible (aka "Authorised Version") of 1611.
--- End quote ---
An excellent example of being able to identify clear purpose and intent in a work of plural authorship.
--- End quote ---
Is it? There are two ways to look at the bible, as literature and as non-fiction. I'm not sure your assertion holds up either way.
I am mostly ignorant about inter-denominational disputes, but don't most of them arise because there is no clear purpose or intent? If the bible is fact and not literature then one needs to find out what the author is trying to tell us. If it is the literal word of God, then it has a single author (an an infallible one at that) so there must be one clear and correct interpretation of it. There is one thing that He intended it to say and that is what it means. If I recognize that it was committed to paper by men, who were not perfect and so maybe it is not exactly the way it was supposed to be I am left with the same problem of trying to dig past the editing and find what the author (still presumable God) meant.
If I read the bible as literature it doesn't matter. It is a collection of stories which don't have ONE meaning that I need to understand. All 4 gospels need not agree on all points and I can take them separately as different stories, or together as an interesting multi-narrator story in which the reader must find the truth. Either way I need not argue about what the author wanted me to know, and instead argue about what the text actually tells me.
I can see your point if you mean it was written with a goal in mind, surly it was, and I can treat it as a historical document. As a historical document I could compare it to earlier English translations or to earlier/contemporary Latin versions and make arguments about what the authors intended to do with their translation. How would this version fix rifts within the Church of England, or whatever (religious studies really is not my thing). But that is still treating it as a non-fiction document, and not a literary work which still fits with my earlier claim that authorship does not matter in literature.
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 26 Feb 2011, 17:19 ---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?
--- End quote ---
And if they are a component in it, they may not be the loudest voice. Of course a creator has ideas about what their work means, but once they let it loose to the public that meaning is not fixed and they cannot control it.
Margret Atwood insists that she doesn't write science-fiction. She says that science fiction is things that can't happen today and that everything she writes is something that could happen today or something which humans have already done on some scale. She is wrong. She writes science-fiction. Her place as creator of a work does not give her the sole power to classify it as she wishes.
I think maybe some of the misunderstanding is that we are approaching this from opposite ends. On the one end an author creates a work, and they certainly have intentions when they do so. It is, hopefully, carefully crafted on their part to tell a story and have an impact on the reader. If they have done their job well, it will. But that work now lives independently of them, and so from the other side, as a reader, I don't care what that intent was. If the author did their job, their message should be inescapable. But in a work that is complex and well written there should be layers of meaning, and what matters is what the text has to say, not what the author has to say. Once a work has been released to the public its meaning is determined, as Khar said through a dialog. The meaning varies based on time and place, social and political climate, based on what readers think and say and the author cannot control it, even if they try.
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