Fun Stuff > ENJOY
let's talk about authorship y'all
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: Papersatan on 27 Feb 2011, 17:49 ---These things the words do, not the author. [...] But the fact remains that once it is printed the words have it. Hopefully they did a good job, and the ideas they wanted to convey are there in the sentences they crafted.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---Literature, for me, is a work which contains layers of meaning and which stands independent of its creator.
--- End quote ---
All well and good, but do you not see the text as telling you something about its creator, as well as the rest of the world? And if you know other things about the creator (maybe other things they said, as well), then the relationship between these is also of interest. It just seems to me that denying the author any part in the future consideration of their work is both belittling to them and unnecessarily blinkered for you. Of course, there may be additional meanings for us that the author did not design - any work may well display aspects of a past era (or even a different part of the modern world) which the author did not plan to show, but which we can see by contrast with our present.
--- Quote ---Or maybe an editor changed it, or maybe it is a typo. Once it is printed that doesn't matter. I can't possibly know why each word ended up where it did. But I can try to understand what it means that they are there.
--- End quote ---
And does not the process by which each word got there also contribute to how you understand and view its meaning? If you know that a word was a misprint, or you know that the author struggled for ages to find just that word, is there not a difference in your appreciation of it? Of course, as a reader you can do what you like, but an editor doesn't have that freedom. Even if he finds a way to present all the variants of different sources of a work, some version needs to be printed as the base against which the variants are shown, whether it is a copy text or the editor's own synthesis; to do a responsible job, the editor has to consider the reason for every variant - and the base version that gets printed, even with the full critical apparatus surrounding it, will influence the readers who don't follow the editor through the whole editorial process.
I have first-hand experience of this, having made the first published edition of a piece of music by Haydn. It is actually an anonymous arrangement of a piece for singer and piano that Haydn himself performed frequently and clearly revised as shown by changes in a number of sources. Its provenance shows that it was made close to Haydn's time, and almost certainly from Haydn's own copy. The copy contains obvious mistakes, but it also contains variants which I believe to be changes made by Haydn to his own copy later than any other source we have representing it (and also, interestingly, variants which would appear to be a record of a singer's ornamentation). The only other modern presentation of this arrangement is a recording (by Christopher Hogwood) which systematically modifies it to bring it in line with the earliest version we have of Haydn's original. Am I wrong to be acknowledging Haydn's continued involvement with this work, even beyond that which is definitively documented?
--- Quote ---If this spits out a really good haiku, which it is bound to do at some point, would it not be good because it wasn't written as an expression of human consciousness? What if I find meaning in it?
--- End quote ---
Monkeys and Shakespeare, eh? Been done...
David_Dovey:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 28 Feb 2011, 06:51 ---
--- Quote from: Papersatan on 27 Feb 2011, 17:49 ---These things the words do, not the author. [...] But the fact remains that once it is printed the words have it. Hopefully they did a good job, and the ideas they wanted to convey are there in the sentences they crafted.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---Literature, for me, is a work which contains layers of meaning and which stands independent of its creator.
--- End quote ---
All well and good, but do you not see the text as telling you something about its creator, as well as the rest of the world? And if you know other things about the creator (maybe other things they said, as well), then the relationship between these is also of interest. It just seems to me that denying the author any part in the future consideration of their work is both belittling to them and unnecessarily blinkered for you.
--- End quote ---
I don't think anybody is suggesting to completely cut the creator of a work out of the critical discourse surrounding said work? It's more that they're saying that too often an overemphasis is put on authorial intention and too much is extrapolated from what we know about the author external to the text in attempting to decipher a work's subtext etc. It's not so much that there's a problem with letting a text say something about it's creator, as letting extraneous information about the creator influence the discourse on the text.
--- Quote ---I have first-hand experience of this, having made the first published edition of a piece of music by Haydn. It is actually an anonymous arrangement of a piece for singer and piano that Haydn himself performed frequently and clearly revised as shown by changes in a number of sources. Its provenance shows that it was made close to Haydn's time, and almost certainly from Haydn's own copy. The copy contains obvious mistakes, but it also contains variants which I believe to be changes made by Haydn to his own copy later than any other source we have representing it (and also, interestingly, variants which would appear to be a record of a singer's ornamentation). The only other modern presentation of this arrangement is a recording (by Christopher Hogwood) which systematically modifies it to bring it in line with the earliest version we have of Haydn's original. Am I wrong to be acknowledging Haydn's continued involvement with this work, even beyond that which is definitively documented?
--- End quote ---
To me all of this doesn't really inform me of anything re: how the actual music is to be experienced and what emotional content is to inferred therein. It's errata, miscellany. Interesting to know for it's own sake, but by no means the least bit necessary to a critical reading of the piece itself.
Elysiana:
I haven't been following this thread from the beginning and I'm at work so I can't fully catch up on it right now, but I wanted to jump in with some thoughts. Forgive me if they've been covered, and ignore me if they're a bit incoherent.
As David Dovey pointed out, this really seems similar to the "what is art" problem - or rather, at what point is something considered a piece of art. I'm not going to try to switch the topic over to that because I think it should be its own separate topic if anything, but there are a lot of ways they coincide.
I'm really balking at the thought that an author should be fully removed from his/her works. In fact, I think it does a disservice to the author to say that his novel should only be read at face value without any insights regarding what his life was like at the time, what agenda he had, etc. We do it with visual art all the time - perhaps because it's easier to recognize the changes in a particular artist? Picasso, for example - it's awfully difficult to talk about his periods without referring to why he was changing his art so drastically.
This is probably just a slippery slope but if you're going to go so far as to say you should remove the author's intentions from the equation, then wouldn't you have to disregard the political and social climate of the era in which it was written?
I guess I just feel that the "extraneous information" is extremely significant to most works of art, including literature. Granted, if you don't know the author's intentions, it's difficult to extrapolate that into something useful, but I would think you should be able to glean plenty of information from their other works, their essays, and their lives, and apply that knowledge intelligently enough to debate their purpose in writing a piece.
I strongly disagree that the messenger is not important. How can you interpret the message properly if you don't know the messenger's intentions, or even try to understand them? So many works are propaganda in disguise. Just because an author explains his viewpoint in the form of an anecdote rather than a nonfiction essay doesn't mean it's not just as charged.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version