When we totally submerged in a work of litterature, the characters of the book all come to life and perform before us. It seems like we observe all events occur one after another just around us. Writings of the author lead us to the ideally constructed world composed by him. Barthes’ idea about “lose the origin” is too objective to achieve. How do we supposed to do to completely ignoring the existence of the author who brings us to his world ? from my point of view, the reason that some masterpieces passes from generation to generation has something really important to do with the authors’ character. Every author has different experience which would affect his character and therefore their writing styles vary. When we read <<les Confessions>> by Jacques Rousseau, his whole purpose was to lead us to himself, to let us get into the spirit of him, and to know about what kind of person he really was, so how can we remove the author then? Maybe the reader and the author don’t have to be at opposite positions, they are connected in a vary nuance manner. The death of author is not necessary… Admittedly some works like folk tales do lost their origin, do they become easier to analyse?

In the past week I’ve been slowly reading through the first two parts of the literary theory, the brand new subject which I was totally unfamiliar with before. By going through the whole contents listed in front of the book, i was wondering why the author make such arrangement of all the theories, is there any connections in those seemingly separated scholars?

Bearing this question in mind, i began to plunge into the extensive ocean of literary theories. Now i know that Structualism derives historically and logically from the Formalism. Overall, i have an impression that both Formalism and Structuralism are trying to explain, to define, and to separate Literature from other scientific subjects in a scientific method, by analysing specific literary characteristics. While Russian Formalists focus on the description of literary language, its techniques of operation, and defamiliarization, Roman Jakobson, who is one of the original critical figures of Formalists, contribute a lot to the task of adducing the internal system or order of linguistic, cultural, and literary phenomena.

To understand the Structuralism, one cannot miss the theory of language by Saussure, who inspires the anthropology, literary and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, intellectuel history and Marxist theory. In order to differantiate language from speech, the conceptions of Sign, Signified, and Signifier were raised and two major principals ( ” the Arbitrary nature of the sign ” and ” the Linear nature of the signifier ” ) were put forward. So can we understand better the Mythologies of Roland Barthes.

So from these conceptions and theories, i think that all those theories have some connections more or less and that literary theories can be perceived as a whole continuous system although its gigantic range of aspects.

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!