Barthes proposal elaborates about who should defines the act of literature. He defends the idea that the Author is “a modern figure” that has been supported by the positivism,  the culmination of capitalism, and now (in 1967), he argues literature can not rely on the Author but the Reader. The Author, says Barthes, is “to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). The Reader, however is a “space” where all the quotations holds together and all the traces find a field.

I agree a lot with Barthes. It is true that the Author became in a mercantilist object, a name who can probably sells or not. For instance, Joanne Rowling had to change her name to J. K. Rowling so it could be most “memorable” for readers. As you probably know, many publishers analyze the names of Authors for marketing process, because is not a person whose name will appear on the cover of a book, is a “brand”, you are selling a product.

I agree also with the idea that critic uses to rely on how to identify episodes of the novels with the real life of the authors. It is pretty common. And easier. Sometimes readers need to feel that behind those amazing stories is a real person who lived those actions, therefore, they empathize with the Author because it seems that not everything that he or she wrote was really made up.

Sometimes, literature itself, disputes the idea of what is an author. In Summertime (2009) J. M. Coetzee, South African writer and Literature Nobel Prize 2003, presents the third part of what it is known as his fictionalised autobiographical trilogy (the first and second parts were Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes of Provincial Life II (2002)). The novel was built with different points of view: some of them are interviews that a journalist carry out with the purpose of finding out how was the life of the writer J. M. Coetzee, who is already dead when the interviews take place, once he returned from USA to South Africa; some parts seems like notebook notes, a diary written by John Coetzee, where the readers can see ideas that spin around John Coetzee’s mind. In the book occurs something unusual for a autobiography: John Coetzee is created from many perspectives. Old lovers or acquaintances tend to describe John Coetzee as a cold, aloof, and odd man. Some says that he was really into languages. None of them remember him as an attractive or handsome man.

The intriguing fact here is that the “autobiography” is written by J. M. Coetzee, so he is making fiction to deconstruct the link that relates the character John Coetzee with the real writer J. M. Coetzee. Is also known that Coetzee does not offer many interviews and he do not talk much about his real life. Here, then, he offers a fictionalised idea of his life, that maybe has some brushstrokes of his reality, and maybe those readers who want to relate his fiction with reality can be a little satisfied.

Second, I know the Reader is an abstract idea on Barthes’ essay. However I can not stop thinking who could ever be that reader. Are all of us readers or only a selected group of people, who really knows that quotations and traces, can be? When Barthes said that the reader is a “space” I wonder if is a metaphor of a library, the Borges paradise. Or perhaps that idea of the Reader is Borges himself, this incredible good memory reader who, in spite of his blindness, was also a writer. I am thinking if we can be those kind of Readers. I do not have Borges’ memory, I do not belong to that elite where he grew up and belonged, I do not speak the languages that he spoke. Maybe I am a reader not a READER.

Perhaps the Reader is this ideal person who can discover a text and try to identify it. Wait: is not that a critic? But if the critics are only dedicated to the “task of discovering the author” (147), can be a critic a Reader or not? I am actually not sure about the definition of Reader.  I am not sure if Barthes is talking about the reader as an human being that still is “pure” and “naive”, and only reads for pleasure, and in this condition can interpret the reading with a clarity that a critics are not longer able to use because they have been corrupted for the critic’s vision.

In this order of ideas, maybe that Reader, still naive and pure, will probably need to identify himself or herself with the Author, and will try to find the Author behind his or her work… And the cycle will never ends.

First, I find quite interesting that most of the readings for this week were written at the beginning of the 20th century. I know during those days many different events took place in the world, but I just reckon that the development of technology, politics, and the construction of new ways of thinking were occurring at the very same time in many places of the world. The environment of those days made that sciences like Linguistics and these theoretical approaches were developed by a intellectuals that were trying not only define their field of study but also they were trying to define what exactly they were. Therefore, for me it is not so clear that Russian Formalists, at least the way how Eichenbaum proposes, do not recognized what the historians of literature had made for them: they gave them a starter point. I remember someone in our last class said that literary movements arise like an answer for the recent literary movement, they disagree with their colleagues ideas and someone, thinking about how to answer to that movement proposes an aesthetic that attacks, contradicts or sometimes continue the past literary aesthetics. In the specific case of literary theory, I think it is pretty much the same.

Second, I see that the big importance of the Russian Formalists, is that they maybe created the first referent of the study of literature as a science, separating it from the artistic field of writing, and the “sentimental” reading. Formalist propose “a distance” (actually, this idea reminds me the “distant effect”, the Verfremdungseffekt, that Brecht will propose forty years later) and analyzed literature as an object “specific and concrete”, and in this way the study of literature converse in something more profound, perhaps more philosophical, that is the “literariness” that Jakobson well defined.

Nevertheless, in Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as technique” (1916), I found the intention of not forgetting that literature could be analyzed an object, but it is still an art. It is fascinating that he points that:

Habitualization devours work, clothes furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are if they had never been’. And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. (16)

The search of the reader/theorist should be to recognize “the sensation on things as they are perceived and not as they are known” (16). The technique of art, according to Shklovsky, is make the objects “unfamiliar”, so they can be truly perceived. Then he quotes how Tolstoy art “defamiliarizes” the objects in some of his works and explain how the descriptions of the places or the objects, trough the Russian writer’s perspective, transforms the perception of the reader.  I agree with him. Few months ago I finished Anna Karenina and there are some episodes that are memorable because the objects localized in Anna’s room, or how her husband combs his mustache, or how Levin observes the common country life, or Kitty smiles, described with a simple language by Tolstoi, takes a relevant perception. Sometimes I felt that some grammatical structures, some images were taking a new dimension only because the poetic speech was created for move, touch the reader’s perception.

This concept, also, reminds me how Orhan Pamuk in The naive and the sentimental novelist  (2011) mentions that Tolstoy elaborates his writing landscape as a painting: every single detail, every color and movement suddenly approach to the reader, in a kind of “zoom in” that always surprised him as a writer.* Of course, Pamuk it is also a painter and his perspectives always are bond to painting, so could be arguable if this comparative relation it is possible to make. However, I think that both critics/readers, Pamuk and Shklovsky, are recognizing the defamiliarization☝ proposed by Tolstoy. The difference is that Pamuk is thinking about images that defamiliarize the habitual world, while Shklovsky particular interest is how the poetic speech create a Tolstoy’s artistic trademark.

Shklovsky’s approach could be useful when analyze literature. The concept of defamiliarization is helpful to define the poetic speech of a writer and, most important, to recover the sensation of life.

Coda: I noticed that theories read for this week were written by western intellectuals. I wonder if at the beginning of the Twentieth Century some other intellectuals from East, Middle East, Oceania… were trying to developed literary theories. Does anybody knows?

*I could not find the book for quoting Pamuk’s words, sorry.

☝Actually, the Verfremdungseffekt is also known as a “defamiliarization effect”. In this perspective, Brecht probably was looking on the stage what the Formalist first developed on literary studies.

Hola.

I am Camilo Castillo, (I am also from Colombia, Liliana!) and I just arrived to Vancouver. I studied Literature Studies long time ago (or no so long?), and I took some literary theory classes. I have to confess (1^st confession) that I did not have the best relations with those classes. At that time, I felt that theory was cold and very distant from literature, I did not feel the warm sensation that I felt, and I still feel, reading novels, short stories or poems. Maybe, now that I think it again, at that time I was cold and distant from theory so I could not feel the warm sensation that probably dwells in it. Maybe, if I think again, today I am more curious about theory than at that time… or maybe I am old? Or both?

Nowadays, I want to confess (2^nd confession) that I am pretty excited for the theory course, I truly believe that taking a look over some theories can help me clarify my research field, which is related with gerontology and old narrator characters in recent Colombian narrative.

Anyway, I am not sure if I will be able of understanding all theories, or most of them, or some of them, or… however, the fact that I will get confuse and I will have the opportunity of share with you guys my confusion it is unique.

Thanks. Gracias. Merci.

Camilo