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let's talk about authorship y'all

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David_Dovey:
Oh hey look, the matter's already been settled


--- Quote from: Johnny C on 25 Feb 2011, 13:22 ---
--- Quote from: Inlander on 28 Jan 2011, 16:42 ---So really I suppose I'm suggesting two levels of classification: "literary" and "non-literary", and "good" and "bad". They're both pretty subjective I guess but neither should be confused with the other and each is almost entirely independent of the other. There are good and bad "literary" books and good and bad "non-literary" books, and the best of the "non-literary" books are better than the worst of the "literary" books.

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you fucks

KharBevNor:
The first thing I'm going to note is that it's probably pretty important to note that I am coming to this debate from a very different intellectual standpoint to JC (who I believe studies english lit or something similiar at university) and Inlander, who is a writer. I am an undergrad (soon to be postgrad touch wood) Fine Art student, so my ideas about authorship have all been directed through that lense. That said, I don't think the debates on authorship and so on in each genre of communication are at all seperate and that my slightlly outside perspective may illuminate some conceptual problems with other more purely literature-focused people's arguments and ideas. Ok.



--- Quote from: Johnny C on 25 Feb 2011, 14:17 ---continuing where we left off – in the same vein that Just Cause Sartre Said It, It Ain't Right (which like wasn't what i said but whatever), Just Cause Barthes Said It Ain't Make It True. i think barthes was arguing for the death of the author from a profoundly false premise, i.e. that the reader was somehow yet to be born, or that taking the author's statements on the text as an interpretation that has some authority behind it is some kind of political aberration.

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I'm not sure I particularly understand the bit about 'the reader somehow yet to be born'. As for the authors statements about the text, why should they have authority? Perhaps my view may seem somewhat paranoid, but consider these two points:
1) We do not know if the author is lying
2) We do not strictly know that the author of the text and the explanatory text is the same person, or at least in the same mental state. (For example, an author may try to radically re-interpret a text they wrote 20 years ago. Why should this be more accurate than anyone elses re-interpretation?)

And authors of all sorts of texts (I'm using text in a wider sense than a piece of writing here) do obviously lie all the time. Think of Leni Riefenstahl claiming she wasn't a fascist, or a recent article I read in which a succession of dancehall reggae musicians deny their songs promote violent homophobia. Respecting the author forgets the fact that the author is human.


--- Quote ---but that leaves out a ton of considerations, first being that people are actually not stupid and don't need the author out of the picture in order to be able to lokat and read and interpret a work, the second being that someone actually had to write the goddamn thing in the first place, and while they might be some kind of literary savant it's a really absurd leap to consider the idea that every author by necessity is a savant.

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I'm not sure I really understand the first bit. People don't need the author out of the picture, nor do they have to ignore what they know (or think they know) about the author. I'm not sure I understand the point of bringing up the second bit actually, come to think of it, but I will bring up the idea here that often times we may actually not know who wrote something, either because it is anonymous or because it is falsely attributed. Ghost-writing is probably more prevalant than ever these days; you bring up Clancy at one point, who is infamous for his franchising and use of ghost-writers and so on. Authorship itself isn't an essential idea that's always been part of art (I would argue it's a function of academism; works have to have titles and authors to be sorted, categorised and talked about). You'll have trouble reliably identifying authors for most works more than a thousand years old, and it's only really with the full-on emergence of the novel as a form in Europe that our modern notions crystallise.


--- Quote ---the difference is that the author's reading manifests itself actually in the text. i don't think harry's necessarily arguing that you have to read a bunch of magazine articles to get to a text's point. he's arguing from sartre's standpoint (among several others, since the idea of authorship and meaning is really fragmented), which suggests that the author's deliberate ordering and construction of events and characters and setting &c&c&c is what ultimately makes up The Text and the reader works within that constructed framework to come to their own conclusions, conclusions drawn from that ordered and structured stuff.
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So, wait. The author arbites the meaning of the text through the text itself? This would seem to suggest that there really is only one correct way of reading any text and any other way of reading it is absurd. That's swell except for obviously even in this reading the author can create deliberate ambiguity, plus if you could tell me the one true author-approved inherently obvious meaning of any text whatsoever I'd be really grateful.


--- Quote ---and the second thing i'm saying is that texts are and always have been and will always be mediated, and the mediator - i.e. the person writing - won't necessarily share your agenda. to shove them off the thing so that you can plant your flag in a piece of literature is like supremely and deeply egotistical, in a way that nobody interested in the capacities of any art should really be. art is fundamentally, for creator and reader, an act of challenging solipsism, something to engage people and get them thinking outside of selfishness. to claim art for selfishness is like seriously ethically suspect.
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I think your problem here is that your imagining the interpretation of text to be a lone individual thing, when of course it's not. Texts are interepreted and reinterpreted socially. Let's take as an example Alice in Wonderland. If we go by authors intent then it's a vaguely paedophiliac satire of new thoughts in mathematics. But that's not what everyone thinks of when they think about it (okay maybe the paedophiliac bit). It's about drugs or dreams or anxiety about growing up or whatever; these interpretations are part of the social dialogue around the work, and have nothing to do with solipsism whatsoever. What I think is way more egotistical is the idea that authors and artists wrest intellectual fire from the gods and are the true guardians and keepers thereof.

pwhodges:

--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 26 Feb 2011, 04:59 ---an author may try to radically re-interpret a text they wrote 20 years ago. Why should this be more accurate than anyone else's re-interpretation?
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Questions of meaning are, I suppose, harder to deal with in music than in literature; but given that, a parallel situation which I think of in classical music, is where a composer has considerably revised a work in later life.  Often there is then strong disagreement between modern critics, or between them and the composer, about which version is actually the better.  Or a closer situation to the literary interpretation one arises when a composer conducts several markedly different recordings of his own work (this is of particular interest in the case of Stravinsky).


--- Quote ---Respecting the author forgets the fact that the author is human.
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This sounds as if your default attitude to other humans is to not respect  them.  This seems sad to me.

KharBevNor:
That's not what I'm trying to say. Perhaps I should instead have said "privileging the author'. Author and authority come from the same route but authority is a pretty thorny issue anyway, especially when we're discussing 'soft' subjects like the humanities.

Papersatan:
I'm gonna have to mostly go with Khar here.  I don't care what the living person who got paid (probably) for a literary work thought or thinks, and neither should you. 

The main thing that makes a work literature in my mind is that I don't care about the author's intent.  When Stephen's mother writes him a letter that says "I've been trying to call, is everything ok?"  We care what she thinks, and what she means, it is not literature.  Newspaper opinion piece, not literature, because with each sentence I am trying to figure out what the writer means, not what the words mean.  Book explaining Battle X in the American Civil war, same; I want to understand what the author wants me to understand.  I am reading this as a form of communications between them and me.  Hopefully their skill in crafting sentences allows me to understand them easily.  Trashy novel telling me a story to entertain me, I care that I am understanding the plot points which the writer is trying to communicate. 

Literature expands past what one person in its creation thought it meant and allows for a deeper analysis of what the work actually says.  Literature tells us something more than what is on the surface, but I'm with Khar, that need not have been the author's intention.  That Civil War book? maybe in 200 years someone else will read it and be fascinated by the message that is between the lines, a message which I was unable to see since I was too close to it (close in time and culture perhaps).  In literary studies we read all sorts of crap that is OLD, but not fiction, things which we can now analyze differently because we were not the author's intended audience.  Some people think that is bullshit though.  Frequently authors try too hard to communicate a message, and in making sure that I get their point, they destroy the literary aspect of their work, American social protest theater from the early 1900's? trash.  Ayn Ryand? trash.

My major problem with trying to find the author's meaning in a work is that in many (all?) cases the "author" is invented.  Someone mentioned ghost writers before, and that is one example, but sometimes it gets more complex than that. 

What happens when you print a work after the author's death?
Shakespreare: Shakespeare was not involved in the collecting and publishing of "his" works; they were published 7 years after his death.  Let's ignore the arguments about who the "real" Shakespeare was, and only focus on the fact that whoever he was he didn't approve the versions of his works which were then published.  So how can I take a single line and pick it apart and then use it to tell you what a man who died nearly 400 years ago thought?  The only "Shakespeare" I can talk about is the author who was created by publishing all these plays and poems under a single name.  And the only thing I have to go on is those works which claim to be his. 

Emily Dickinson: Dickinson is standard high school lit here and intro to lit college classes.  Everyone has taken a Dickinson poem and untangled it and figured out what it means.  Dickinson didn't publish her poetry.  Her poetry was pretty much un-publishable really.  She had all sorts of punctuation which there was no way to print, and would write two lines in one place and some of her works were more like art objects: one of her poems on crickets was wrapped around the body of a dead cricket, you can't tell me that doesn't change it's meaning.  You can't print dead cricket carcasses.  She had no say in the editing of her works into printed poems, so I find it impossible to analyze them based on her intentions, but many people do.   We still have her originals though, which is more than can be said for Shakespeare.

What happens when an author is alive, but they work closely with an editor?
Printing a work is not some magical process where by I create a perfect work and then Penguin typesets it and prints it.  Works are edited, sometimes heavily.  How do you account for the voice of the editor in analysis?  I cannot remember the author's name at the moment, but an author from the last century know for is sparse style died and his wife published his manuscripts.  Come to find he rambled on for ages, his editor gave him the style he is known for. 

What do you do when more than one edition of a work exists? 
Are we to spend all our time trying to figure out which one is "right"?  Based on what?  What order do The Canterbury Tales go in?  There is no way we can divine which one Chaucer preferred it is a waste of time.  Instead we can talk about how the order changed the work.  What do you do when new editions come out? ignore the old ones?

These are all issues that don't matter if you recognize that the "author" is created by a work and not vice versa.  The biological person who first arranged some words doesn't matter. 

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