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[Johnny C]

Can we please, please, please stop describing literature and sci-fi as entirely separate things? thanks!

Only as long as we continue to recognise that while literature can encompass any genre, there is a clear difference between "literary" and "non-literary" writing.

Please describe that difference? I wasn't aware that there were standards. Is this like how an academic journal requires a certain system of referencing? Who are we excluding from the realm of the literary exactly? I am interested to see how you can formulate a set of rules for dividing the 'literary' and 'non-literary' (unless you are simply talking about fiction and non-fiction) which does not end up excluding important parts of even the accepted canon, let alone all the other things thought to be worthy of consideration but not generally included in that illustrious company.

It's got nothing to do with standards and everything to do with what the writer is trying to achieve. I define a "non-literary" piece of writing as something that has no more aspirations than simply entertaining the reader. There's nothing wrong with that and I read my share of such books, but they don't linger long in the mind. As far as I'm concerned "literary" writing aspires to actually tell us something about the world in which we live, to make some incisive comment or to drive the reader to ask questions about their surroundings or see those surroundings anew.

For an example I'll offer Matter, the most recent Culture novel by Iain M. Banks. I've read all the Culture novels and enjoyed them a good deal (otherwise I wouldn't keep reading them!) but ultimately in the majority of cases they don't say anything to me of greater significance than "Here, read this, it'll be fun". By contrast the Iliad, while just as action-packed and gruesome as any of Banks's novels, offered me all sorts of insights into war and humanity.

This is not a comment on quality. It's got nothing to do with style. There are plenty of books which aspire to be purely literary and are boring or badly written. There are plenty of genre books which use crime, or science fiction, or what have you, to make genuinely incisive observations about the world. And there are plenty of genre books which try to do so and fail miseraly, such as Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy. But to say that there's no difference between "literary" and "non-literary" books is some postmodern relativist nonsense that I can't support.

If the only difference between the two are the 'aspirations' of the author, doesn't the separation blur to the point of invisibility when non-literary works can also fill the same role, and thus rendering the distinction pointless? You brought up Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy - there's no question in my mind that Larsson tried to (aspired to, as it were) make some sort of comment on misogyny. Poorly executed, sure, but it was certainly an attempt - so is it literary or non-literary? If you'd said Tom Clancy I might have agreed with you, but to my mind, Iain Banks and Stieg Larsson both attempt to comment or force us to think in the ways you described. The "pure entertainment"-factor might higher than in the Iliad, but if the line really is as clear as it seems to you, where is it drawn, and how do we distinguish the two kinds from one another?

Of course, I agree with you (and I suspect everyone else does too) that there is a clear difference between the aspirations of Homer and Stieg Larsson, but if the same distinction is to be drawn between the books of Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks (provided you agree that his non-scifi novels are literary works), the aspirations of the writer seems to be criteria too murky to use easily.

I'm probably going down a rabbit-hole here but I don't for a minute want to suggest that all "literary" writing is better than all "non-literary" writing. There's long been a trend in crime fiction in particular for what we might call "literary crime writing" - George Pelecanos is an obvious example. I would place Stieg Larsson in that particular sub-genre - but at the lowest, least impressive end of it. However ham-fistedly, he was clearly trying to say something meaningful about identity politics, and about the role of the outsider in society, and about control of society by the authorities, etc.

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. As I've maintained since the start:

literature can encompass any genre

And by extension, works in any genre can be "literary".

Hey now now. Ever read any Roland Barthes...death of the author, etc.? The intent of the author is seperate from the content of the text which is seperate from the reading reached by the reader. This is like, post-modern literary criticism 101, and it makes eminent sense. We can only really claim to have an idea of what the author intends the messave of their work to be through cultural, linguistic and metatextual clues outside of the text itself; where these clues do not exist, how are we to evaluate the text? As critics, we are readers. Any text must be considered from the point of view of how it is read; anything else is really insupportable. And it seems plain that any text can communicate the arbitrarily defined 'meaningful' messages you claim seperate the literary from the non-literary to a specific person. Some people may draw meaningful meditations on the human condition from Iain M. Banks, or from the back of a cereal packet. But of course, the very idea that there are certain aspirations a writer must have is woefully subjective in the first place.

And what about the sections of Shakespeares plays written entirely to amuse the cheap seats. What of the endless words Dickens churned out mostly to meet publishers deadlines.

I'm sorry but as a life-long reader this strikes me as manifestly untrue. Reading is a skill like any other and those who are practiced in it - as everyone participating in this thread surely is - should be able to identify what point (if any) an author is trying to make in his or her writing with relative ease. Of course we're free to add our own intepretations and doing so will even enhance our experience of the text but the idea that the author is simply a vessel through which the words pour is ridiculous. Perhaps I'm occupying an unusual position in that I've written many tens of thousands of words of fiction over the last decade or more and I spend a large amount of time thinking very seriously and in great depth about the craft as well as the art of writing, but if a writer is unable to convey their intentions clearly to the reader then the writer has failed in their chosen field of endeavour.

And what about the sections of Shakespeares plays written entirely to amuse the cheap seats.

What about them? They're sections, as you say, not the whole. Surely you're not suggesting that we start isolating particular excerpts from a piece of writing and start considering them as if they were a whole and complete text?

What of the endless words Dickens churned out mostly to meet publishers deadlines.

Maybe they're not "literary" by my definition. That doesn't mean that Dickens isn't a "literary" writer. Graham Greene famously divided his novels into "novels" and "entertainments".

I think this is a very narrow idea indeed. Surely this is a difference between fiction and non-fiction. Much art arises out of a failure to be able to clearly communicate. Furthermore, I think you're fundamentally wrong; the text itself cannot reliably communicate the authors intentions. Even the most straightforward text can be interpreted in a huge number of ways: as a code, as an allegory, using a marxist reading or a feminist reading. Winnie the Pooh can be about the class system or spiritual enlightenment or whatever, depending on how the reader chooses to see it. The intention of the author is a fact that is extrinsic to the text itself; even if it is stated in the text we do not actually know the authors intention, we only know the authors stated intention. It becomes clear, in fact, that the stated or presented intention is all the intention we can ever know, if we know the intention at all. Thus, plainly the idea of intention is meaningless; it is the relationship between the reader and the text that is important, as it is the only one that we, as the critic/reader, actually understand, at least in the single special case of our own relationship with a text. An author can call his works whatever the hell he wants, but if a reader can read a book that has been called mere 'entertainment' and comes away enlightened, and if a reader can read a book that is supposed to be full of some deep, considered meaning and is merely entertained, or bored shitless, then we can see the idea is completely false. It relies on an insupportable intellectual premise.

EDIT:

What about them? They're sections, as you say, not the whole. Surely you're not suggesting that we start isolating particular excerpts from a piece of writing and start considering them as if they were a whole and complete text?

Not exactly. It raises another enormous flaw in your argument though. How do you judge the overall quality of a work which contains supposedly 'literary' and 'non-literary' segments? If a novel contains 10 chapters of 'non-literature' and one chapter of 'literature' is the overall result 'literature' or does the 'literature' content have to be over a certain level. Bringing up things like this exposes the terrible weakness of the definition you're trying to make.

Although I am happy with the idea that we can choose to place our own interpretation on the text (and in many cases may have to), I really do not see any justification for the jump at the end of your statement in my quote.  If the author tells you something, why is it then "plain" that what they tell you is meaningless?

Because we cannot assume the author is reliably stating his intention. I should probably have been a little clearer; it's not meaningless in terms of being without content, it's meaningless in terms of being an objective or reasonable standard by which to categorise work.

Part of me really wants to continue this whole literature/non literature debate because it's endlessly fascinating but a greater part of me realises that it's got less and less to do with the thread at hand and it really only involves myself and Khar, and neither of us are going to change the other's mind.

actually i hadnt read this but it owns that khar is a strict barthesian re: authorial theory it's too bad he's already been ethered like fifty years previous by sartre who posited that texts are ultimately a negotiation between writer and reader not reader and text and that the work of the two interested human parties in tandem is ultimately what generates the meeting so in fact Writers Do Matter i'm sorry to weigh in on this really glibly i should go home

Just because Sartre posits something doesn't mean it's true. I don't do much thinking about literature (such a restricted form of communication is beneath me), but you seem to be suggesting something similiar to the idea in aesthetics whereby a work of art is taken to be like a conversation and people find aesthetic value in the same sort of things they value in a conversation. Value/quality and meaning are not the same thing at all however, although the two things may have already been rather confused in the conversation above, but not in the same way. My argument, which I think is perfectly sound and pretty difficult to assail, is that the intent of the author is ultimately uncertain and thus cannot be used as a qualifier to sort works into two sets ('literature' and 'not literature'), because it makes the two sets meaningless, and thus the terms meaningless.

New thread?

and here we are

[Johnny C]

i mean one thing that should probably be said right off is that "literature" as a noun is nebulous but shouldn't and doesn't necessarily exclude genre fiction, and nobody arguing re: writers and intent would be on solid theoretical or practical ground arguing otherwise, i think.

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.

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.

worse still, the argument kind of shoots itself in the foot by presuming that an author of a text is not also a reader of it, which is like borderline absurd unless you're going to bring up Automatic Writing which is a fun and neat little experiment i guess but to suggest that there is somehow a distancing of the self from that kind of writing you are going to have to pull some serious psychospiritual acrobatics. 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.

what i guess i'm ultimately saying is twofold. first, i'm saying that to eliminate the author from the conversation is to withdraw another voice from a conversation surrounding a literary text, which when you get down to it is all texts are. they might spring from a failure to communicate (a specious observation at best, and by far too broad to with which to paint every extant text) but they are nevertheless a medium for communication, a locus for relationships to the world. (even "non-literary" texts accomplish this; clancy, for example, is able to reflect several strains of contemporary american nationalism and exceptionalism and other deep and complex stuff that his novels scratch the surface on without expanding but which any reader can theoretically parse in relation to said world).

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.

as well and you'll have to pardon me for sounding elitist or whatever but i think the argument that Every Single Reading Is By Necessity Correct Cause The Reader Is King Shit Of Fuck Mountain is like a complete crock since what it rewards is not close reading and attention to the text as it is and attention to the relationships that can be generated from the text into the world but rather ultimately it rewards having theoretical axes to grind. more pointedly, just because you read something in a text doesn't make you right. try doing a feminist reading of an 18th century novel by a woman writer and you can probably argue with a ton of quotes and feminist reading methodology that the novel is in fact feminist. you'll also be missing like several facts, one of which is the glaring one that no text written prior to the codification of feminism can possibly be feminist in intent because the author literally would not have known what that is. this is an example but it's a risk you take in all readings of texts that fail to take the author into consideration, that risk being that in attempting to reclaim it for whatever theoretical vantage point you might want to yank people's heads towards you'll actually miss some of the stuff that's going on in the text. (see up above my arguments re: selfishness cause they apply here too)

i mean – i just read dfw's "joseph frank's dostoevsky", which like as far as i can tell in terms of arguing for the consideration of author is as important as anything barthes or sartre wrote on the subject, addressing everything from the Intentional Fallacy (for which he and i have the same reasons for thinking it's not really much of a fallacy and that the people calling it a fallacy are walking on thin theoretical ice, i.e. New Criticism and poststructuralist lit theory, both of which have this unnerving habit of being basically totally shitty towards fiction) to the various ways small-i ideology might function within a text and within literary criticism as well. other people than barthes have written on this, and by and large the only people still hewing close to the author-as-dead are like veterans of the mid-90s Theory Wars that overtook literature departments across the West. plus barthes said shit like "The reader is without history, biography, psychology" which is one of the dumbest things i've ever heard in my life since i'm pretty sure i have all three of those things

[Joseph]

I'm going to come back and try and write out a reasonable contribution to this later, but in the meantime, would it really hurt you to capitalize here Johnny? I'm all for the way that the stylization of lower case plays in to your usual posts, but when you're writing a short essay on literature, all you're really accomplishing is making the text aggravating to read. Perhaps that's your intention, but really, it's more than a little annoying to be trying to pick apart what you're saying when you style it like that.

[KvP]

try doing a feminist reading of an 18th century novel by a woman writer and you can probably argue with a ton of quotes and feminist reading methodology that the novel is in fact feminist. you'll also be missing like several facts, one of which is the glaring one that no text written prior to the codification of feminism can possibly be feminist in intent because the author literally would not have known what that is.

Well, "feminism", yeah, as a movement, sure, but the farther afield you go in that big messy tent full of concepts I don't think it's such a stretch. Like it's obviously preposterous to argue that some 18th century writer was intentionally sowing the seeds of contemporary feminist theory in her work, but tracing a lineage back to it, I don't see the big deal. It's sort of like saying "Jesus Christ was a socialist", which is not even technically correct, but one could still find a definite counterpoint to individualistic capitalism in his teachings even when such a thing hadn't been formulated yet and wouldn't be for millennia.

I mean far be it from me to argue some "discovery of truth" as though feminism was like the atom or Uranus and existed when people had no conception of it, but you know what I'm saying.

[David_Dovey]

I was under the impression that "literary" and "genre" fiction were fairly standardised distinctions?

Also: Another "what is art" conversation ITT

[David_Dovey]

Oh hey look, the matter's already been settled

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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?

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).

Respecting the author forgets the fact that the author is human.

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. 

[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.

[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]

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"?

What on earth else could it be? It wasn't written by thirty trees!

While thinking about this, consider the example of the King James Bible (aka "Authorised Version") of 1611.

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]

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"?

What on earth else could it be? It wasn't written by thirty trees!

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]

While thinking about this, consider the example of the King James Bible (aka "Authorised Version") of 1611.

An excellent example of being able to identify clear purpose and intent in a work of plural authorship.

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.
 

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?

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. 

[Inlander]

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"?

It's an expression of thirty people, and thus arguably, an expression of no individual consciousness.

True; however, in your initial positing of a work created by thirty people you made no mention of individual consciousness, just human consciousness. Granted in my previous post I used the singular "somebody", suggesting an individual, but it doesn't take a lot of mental flexibility to see that "somebody" could suggest a team of authors just as easily as it suggests a single author. Ultimately I stand by my argument:

Who the author is is largely besides the point . . . The message is what's important, not the messenger.

[Inlander]

I am mostly ignorant about inter-denominational disputes, but don't most of them arise because there is no clear purpose or intent?

It really depends how you're definining "clear purpose or intent". Of course different denominations argue at length and intractibly about different interpretations of the Bible; however I'd imagine they all agree that ultimate objective of the authors was to create the general rules and guidelines of Christian life. This goes all the way back to what I first said about literature and non-literature, ie that literature attempts to tell us something meaningful about the world. The Bible obviously does that. Whether it does it well is another matter (and there's a very strong argument to be made that the Bible is a very poorly written book, or series of books, indeed) and I've already tried to seperate the qualitative from the quantitative.

[Papersatan]

I am mostly ignorant about inter-denominational disputes, but don't most of them arise because there is no clear purpose or intent?

I'd imagine they all agree that ultimate objective of the authors was to create the general rules and guidelines of Christian life.

I don't think that is enough though.  To say what an author tried to create or tried to explore is not the same as saying, what their work means or what it actually says.  Faulkner tried to depict the tensions in southern american culture.  Attwood tries to show the tension between human ambition and humanity.  Jane Austen explores the marriage market of her time.  These descriptions of authorial goals don't tell us what a work actually argues.  What truths does the text hold to be true?  What evidence does the text offer that X is better then Y?  How does the text show the reader that a cultural attitude is a problem or that a character should have made a different choice? 

These things the words do, not the author.  Words are beautiful and layered, words have textures and shades of meaning.  No one person, no matter how good they are at their craft, can have full command of their language and see every reading contained in their work.  I think most authors know this and agonize over things like punctuation and word choice.  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 covey are there in the sentences they crafted. 

I, as a literature student, am going to spend hours digging though a paragraph picking apart word choice and word order.  I care which adjective is used to describe a character.  The author may have chosen "sour" because the alliteration was nice, or because of the shade of meaning it offered, maybe they hoped it would remind the reader of an earlier scene, or that a later scene would recall this one.  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.
 

This goes all the way back to what I first said about literature and non-literature, ie that literature attempts to tell us something meaningful about the world.

I also don't think that is enough to separate literature from other writings.  A non-fiction book about World War I is trying to tell me something meaningful.  An passionate essay from a war survivor about the horrors of war is trying to tell me something meaningful.  A newspaper article, same.  These are all cases where I care what the author means.  They are not literature, they are just communication through print.  Non-literary communication can be meaningful, powerful, moving, even life-changing to read.  But for me that doesn't make it literature. 

Literature, for me, is a work which contains layers of meaning and which stands independent of its creator.  Literature is art. 

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.

I agree that the message is what is important, but I believe the message is created by the reader.  I can't ever know what the author intended to convey for most of the texts I read.  Most of the authors have been dead for ages.  Works become classics because they offer some message to readers.  This message need not be the expression the author wanted to make.  I don't mean to endorse a happy feel good "any meaning you find is the right meaning" attitude.  The text has to support your reading, but the author need not. 

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? 

[ruyi]

I will try to contribute later, but in the meantime, you guys might enjoy reading "What is an Author?" by Foucault. It's another one of those little essays that pops up a lot in discussion on authorship.

Googling (so you don't have to!) has led me to: html scribd pdf

[ruyi]

Okay well actually I do have some thoughts in my head so I better dump them here while I can.

These things the words do, not the author.  Words are beautiful and layered, words have textures and shades of meaning.  No one person, no matter how good they are at their craft, can have full command of their language and see every reading contained in their work.  I think most authors know this and agonize over things like punctuation and word choice.  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 covey are there in the sentences they crafted.  

I, as a literature student, am going to spend hours digging though a paragraph picking apart word choice and word order.  I care which adjective is used to describe a character.  The author may have chosen "sour" because the alliteration was nice, or because of the shade of meaning it offered, maybe they hoped it would remind the reader of an earlier scene, or that a later scene would recall this one.  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.

Just to build off this, I had a professor who liked to say, "language speaks you," which I think is pretty useful, because it's true, no individual person spontaneously creates a whole novel--we've collectively created the language, the technology of writing and books, etc. So meaning and value, even the delineation of "a" novel or "work" of art, necessarily develops/occurs in a decentralized manner.
 
I had a chance to read a little bit of this book, which I really enjoyed! I'm not confident in my retelling of its main points, but I'll try anyways. It's helped me think about how any one thing that I might think to call a single work of art with an author has actually come about by the actions of many, many different individuals, groups, institutions, etc. Here's a clumsy example: say that book, Huck Finn, by Mark Twain. Before he wrote the book, there was already the English language, the practice of reading and circulating writings in book format, the practice we call fiction, and you could go on. After he wrote the book, it got published, circulated, given a reputation by many different people, and so on. People can study the book and pick out tropes, literary devices, and so on, which again, are developed by many people. So when I pick up a copy and read that book, I'm not just seeing the decisions of a guy named Mark Twain, but a whole society.

Hmm okay maybe that was not so useful. I admit I have not read what you guys have been saying thus far too closely, but I promise I will before I make another post!

Literature, for me, is a work which contains layers of meaning and which stands independent of its creator.  Literature is art.

I think the issue of what counts as art is certainly related to authorship, but it might be helpful to talk about them separately.

[pwhodges]

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.

Literature, for me, is a work which contains layers of meaning and which stands independent of its creator.

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.

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.

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?

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? 

Monkeys and Shakespeare, eh?  Been done...

[David_Dovey]

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.

Literature, for me, is a work which contains layers of meaning and which stands independent of its creator.

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.

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.

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?

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.