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?
yingzheng
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Yes! I also agree that knowing the author of a work is important because it gives us more information/tools to analyse a work! And like you mentioned some works that are ananomous are sometimes harder to analyse. Yet I think that this can be double sided because as it was mentioned in the readings for this week when it talks about the “proper name of an author” just having a name might limit of hinder your freedom to analyse.
Hummm knowing the author (name, fame, ideas…) may influence our way of looking at a text?? I heard that from different people last week and the idea came to me as well during my readings. I was shocked o_O’ …Are we underestimating our capacity of being objective when reading a text? We have been reading these different articles on critical theory…and we discussed them in class… We read articles about famous critics…Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, etc…and still we were able to question / challenge some of their assumptions…no matter how influential they are in their field of study. Why do we think we are incapable of doing the same when reading a literary text, that is distinguishing the text from the author and be able to adopt a critical position on our reading?